Aleph Neuro releases highest-resolution noninvasive 3D brain vascular images using ultrasound and microbubble tracking

Very cracked former friend from Google X.

Bullish

well this is cool

When we started Aleph, we were just doing scrappy ultrasound experiments - testing whether you can get any signal through the skull at all. Turned out: with @butterflynetinc chips, you can!

Now we've got a few research projects going. You've seen the olfactory stimulation, and you'll see some more in the near future.

We scanned the blood flow inside the brain using microbubbles+ultrasound.

What is really striking to me about the imaging is how interpretable and physical the data feels. You can just see the actual microbubbles flowing through the brain in the ultrasound acquisitions!

We are not yet done! The next step is to communicate in latents—the raw thoughts that words can only approximate.

We believe telepathy will be as important and as natural as words and hands. It is perhaps the only technology with the hope of expanding human intelligence and connection like language once did.

Very excited to see the launch of @alephneuro!

They've released their first milestone: the most detailed vascular image of a human brain.

They are working on some truly groundbreaking research in hopes of achieving noninvasive BCI!

They are betting on ultrasound imaging! Like I have been saying, ultrasound is highly underrated :)

@humanscotti and I have known the Aleph team for quite some time and got to visit their lab last year, it's been great to see their progress!!

And glad our MindEye research inspired them to work on this :)

There are only a few ways to image the brain without surgery: electricity, magnets, light, sound. All existing methods either produce blurry images or require a room-sized machine.

Our image is captured with ultrasound transmitted through the skull, with a contrast agent.

We expect the data to contain a wealth of information about brain activity.

Here are videos decoded from the brain by researchers using fMRI (NeuroClips, 2024) - a similar kind of readout of the brain:

We think this problem is newly tractable.

In 2023, MindEye showed astonishing reconstructions of seen images from fMRI brain data.

On the left: the image that was shown to a subject. On the right: the image predicted from the subject’s brain activity.

I believe neurotech is the field that needs to be accelerated the most right now. AI is going to get better, compute is going to get built, but expanding human capabilities by being able to interact with our brains more deeply is going to move the needle on how the singularity will unfold. The default path, unfortunately, is humans becoming far less capable than AIs.

Excited to share our big step towards decoding the brain’s thoughts!

When we were first injecting the microbubbles for the scan, I was surprised by the coldness of the saline flowing through my veins - it was my first IV.

And before you ask: no, the bubbles don’t tickle. (1/n)

All this was done with a small team of 5. We’re hiring.

The work is hard, but this future is so curious, so incisively at the center of what it means to be human, that it would be heartbreaking to look away.

https://alephneuro.com

Our results today are the first super-resolution 3D images of blood flow in the human brain with an intact skull using contrast agents. It is the first step towards a non-contrast telepathy device.

We know that there will be many applications of transcranial microbubble imaging beyond what we’re working on, such as stroke detection.

Therefore, we are open-sourcing our pipeline behind these images.

Read more in our blogpost: https://alephneuro.com/blog/ultrasound-brain

It's been a wild journey, and I'm grateful to have shared it with @_marleyx, @raffi_hotter, @thomas_rribeiro, and @jffbrwn2.

And huge thanks to everyone else who's been along for the ride in their various capacities - @shir0kawa, @aidanmantine, @guillefix, @nevadasanchez, @yush_g, @JeanProvost, @rokirchev, @exr0n_finally, @clairebookworm, @masonwang025, and many others!

Oh and we open sources a lot of this! https://github.com/alephneuro/braindump

You have a few billion bubbles per scan in you. They're FDA-approved and live for 1-2 minutes. There's no air in them - just a small lipid shell with a special gas inside.

The actual Aleph telepathy device will not use them - they're just for research.

@pennycheck @alephneuro Yes. Aleph is a brilliant @ButterflyNetInc’s Embedded™ partner, developing on our Ultrasound-on-Chip technology. It’s super gratifying to see multiple partners, from Midjourney to Aleph, building extraordinary, breakthrough applications on the $BFLY platform.

Human brains have remained the same for 100,000 years. But language has changed what we do with them unrecognizably. We care, we express ourselves, we inherit the revolutions of past humans through language.

Resolution matters for decoding the brain. In theory, ultrasound can achieve the specs needed for decoding the brain: mm-resolution and wide brain coverage, accomplishing what fMRI can do as a device that fits in the palm of your hand. Ultrasound-on-a-chip technology from @ButterflyNetInc makes it possible.

@levchizhov @_marleyx @raffi_hotter @thomas_rribeiro @jffbrwn2 @shir0kawa @guillefix @nevadasanchez @thomas_rribeiro imaging a glass of milk because its lipids are close to the size of red blood cells. flappy approved.