Changes in cerebral blood flow are associated with stroke, aneurysms, vascular cognitive impairment, neurodegenerative diseases and other pathologies. Brain angiograms, typically performed via computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, are limited to millimetre-scale resolution and are insensitive to blood-flow dynamics. Here, we show that ultrafast ultrasound localization microscopy of intravenously injected microbubbles enables transcranial imaging of deep vasculature in the adult human brain at microscopic resolution and the quantification of haemodynamic parameters. Adaptive speckle tracking to correct for micrometric brain-motion artefacts and for ultrasonic-wave aberrations induced during transcranial propagation allowed us to map the vascular network of tangled arteries, to functionally characterize blood-flow dynamics at a resolution of up to 25 μm, and to detect blood vortices in a small deep-seated aneurysm in a patient. Ultrafast ultrasound localization microscopy may facilitate the understanding of brain haemodynamics and of how vascular abnormalities in the brain are related to neurological pathologies.

The strain rate effect on large strain dissipation and behavior recovery are presented to understand the toughening effect of silica nanoparticles in nanohybrid hydrogels. Such nanohybrid gels combine a poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide) (PDMA) covalent network and physical interactions by adsorption of polymer chains at the silica nanoparticle surface. A series of model nanohybrid gels has been designed to obtain a well-controlled architecture. First insights on the structure (SANS) demonstrated that silica nanoparticles were welldispersed in the gel, including after cyclic mechanical loading. The characteristic times involved in the nanoparticle/polymer association were investigated by large strain mechanical cycling varying the strain rate from 3 × 10 −4 s −1 to 0.6 s −1 . The mechanical behavior of the hybrid hydrogel varies tremendously over a relatively small range of strain rates, ranging from almost non dissipative (at slow strain rates) to highly dissipative at high strain rates. However, upon cycling over time-scales of tens of seconds, the strong physical interactions taking place between nanosilica particles and PDMA network chains enabled the hydrogel to recover its initial mechanical properties. The main feature of this work is the remarkable role played by silica nanoparticles in the network to promote transient and recoverable connectivity by reversible adsorption/desorption processes. The strong strain rate dependence suggests that toughening mechanisms operating at standard strain rates as often reported, maybe quite different at slower or larger strain rates.