Transcranial acoustoelectric brain imaging with high spatiotemporal resolution.

Non-invasive neuroimaging has long faced the inherent trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution. Acoustoelectric brain imaging (ABI) holds promise to bridge this gap by combining the spatial precision of focused ultrasound (millimeter-level) with the temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) signals (millisecond-level). However, its transcranial application remains fundamentally challenged by skull-induced wavefront aberration and attenuation. Here, we developed a full ABI system featuring a custom 128-element ultrasound phased array. Our system integrates developed algorithms for transcranial phase and amplitude correction, which were experimentally validated through an ex vivo human skull. We demonstrate that our system enables precise intracranial focus steering (lateral error ≤ 0.2 mm), accurate source localization (error ≤ 0.8 mm), and high-fidelity waveform reconstruction (correlation coefficient > 0.84). This work addresses the fundamental challenge of skull-induced imaging quality degradation in ABI, providing algorithmic and systemic foundations for advancing non-invasive neuroimaging techniques.