Ultrasound neuromodulation hypotheses on the directionality of effects and community resource.

In healthy human participant low-intensity transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), meta-analysis across 47 studies (52 experiments) shows stimulation intensity and continuity trends toward neural enhancement or suppression.

• Why it matters: Directionality of TUS effects is uncertain, and existing human and animal findings motivate hypotheses that could improve precision for brain stimulation and neuromodulation.
• What they did: The authors collated directionality hypotheses and ran an initial meta-analysis of healthy human TUS studies, then used exploratory univariate tests and limited machine-learning due to small sample size.
• The result: They created the inTUS database to systematically report TUS parameters and outcomes, aiming to enable more precise prediction of effect directionality as sample sizes grow.