ArticleeLife2024
Auditory confounds can drive online effects of transcranial ultrasonic stimulation in humans.
Article in eLife, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Neuromodulation effects of low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound in human, a systematic review focusing on motor and sensory functions.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2025Pooled it
- Transcranial Pulse Stimulation Enhances Dexterity in Parkinson's Disease: A Randomized Sham-Controlled Trial.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2026Trial
- Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound of the Amygdala in Depression and Anxiety: A First-in-Human Active-Controlled Trial.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Effects of online motor cortex transcranial ultrasound stimulation on interhemispheric inhibition.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Bayesian-enhanced closed-loop optimization of ultrasound protocols for targeted and precise neuromodulation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The human amygdala in threat learning and extinction.Science advances · 2026Article
- Transcranial focused ultrasound induces source localizable cortical activation in resting state humans when applied concurrently with transcranial electric stimulation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation in Psychiatric Disorders: Mechanisms, Models, and Missing Links.Biological psychiatry · 2026Review
- Rapid modulation of choice behavior by ultrasound on the human frontal eye fields.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Translational prospectives for deep brain stimulation and low-intensity focused ultrasound neuromodulation: IFCN Handbook chapter.Clinical neurophysiology practice · 2026Review
- Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Enhances the Discriminative Power of Targeted Voluntary Motor Signals in Humans.IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society · 2026Article
- Transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation in schizophrenia: current evidence, mechanisms, and future directions.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- Transcranial ultrasound stimulation selectively enhances fronto-temporal context-guided memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Challenges and lessons learned in attempts to develop in vitro models for ultrasound neuromodulation using local field potential measurements in hippocampal tissue.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Acoustic Coupling for Double-Blind Human Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Sensory Entrained TMS (seTMS) Enhances Motor Cortex Excitability.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Parameter optimisation for mitigating somatosensory confounds during transcranial ultrasonic stimulation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Individualized non-invasive deep brain stimulation of the basal ganglia using transcranial ultrasound stimulation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Leveraging transcranial ultrasound stimulation to enhance self-regulation in emotion and sleep.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- A double-blind replication attempt of offline 5Hz-rTUS-induced corticospinal excitability.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
18 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Transcranial ultrasonic stimulation (TUS) is rapidly emerging as a promising non-invasive neuromodulation technique. TUS is already well-established in animal models, providing foundations to now optimize neuromodulatory efficacy for human applications. Across multiple studies, one promising protocol, pulsed at 1000 Hz, has consistently resulted in motor cortical inhibition in humans (Fomenko et al., 2020). At the same time, a parallel research line has highlighted the potentially confounding influence of peripheral auditory stimulation arising from TUS pulsing at audible frequencies. In this study, we disentangle direct neuromodulatory and indirect auditory contributions to motor inhibitory effects of TUS. To this end, we include tightly matched control conditions across four experiments, one preregistered, conducted independently at three institutions. We employed a combined transcranial ultrasonic and magnetic stimulation paradigm, where TMS-elicited motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) served as an index of corticospinal excitability. First, we replicated motor inhibitory effects of TUS but showed through both tight controls and manipulation of stimulation intensity, duration, and auditory masking conditions that this inhibition was driven by peripheral auditory stimulation, not direct neuromodulation. Furthermore, we consider neuromodulation beyond driving overall excitation/inhibition and show preliminary evidence of how TUS might interact with ongoing neural dynamics instead. Primarily, this study highlights the substantial shortcomings in accounting for the auditory confound in prior TUS-TMS work where only a flip-over sham and no active control was used. The field must critically reevaluate previous findings given the demonstrated impact of peripheral confounds. Furthermore, rigorous experimental design via (in)active control conditions is required to make substantiated claims in future TUS studies. Only when direct effects are disentangled from those driven by peripheral confounds can TUS fully realize its potential for research and clinical applications.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.