No abstract

A man comes into the clinic, hands trembling. He can barely write or hold a cup of water. He straps on a specialized head device, lies back and slides into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Across the room, a physician pushes a button -and the shaking stops. Handed a piece of paper, the man signs his name legibly, hands steady.This kind of transformation is not wishful thinking. Videos documenting such interventions are readily available online. At their heart is a newly approved technology that uses MRI to aim ultrasonic waves -best known for use in prenatal monitoring -at specific areas of the brain. "We can focus the ultrasound through the skull to a part of the thalamus about the size of a grain of rice, " says W. Jamie Tyler, a neuroscientist who studies non-invasive brain stimulation at Arizona State University in Tempe. In that scenario, ultrasound heats and kills neurons in the thalamus, the brain area thought to give rise to a movement disorder called essential tremor, which affects millions of people worldwide. Last year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved focused ultrasound thalamotomy as a treatment for people with essential tremor who haven't responded to medication.Today, some scientists are setting their sights on another frontier. By influencing the brain more subtly -zapping small groups of neurons enough to boost or suppress their activity without killing them outright -ultrasound could potentially treat other movement disorders, as well as depression, anxiety and a host of intractable neuropsychiatric disorders, as easily and painlessly as the procedure that calms shaking hands, says Shy Shoham, a biomedical engineer from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who is starting a lab at New York University Langone Medical Center.The emerging technology, called focusedultrasound neuromodulation, makes use of energies at least an order of magnitude lower than those used for treating tremor. Instead of blasting and killing brain cells, Shoham says, "you basically dial down the system".To some extent, other non-invasive techniques can already do this using magnetic fields or direct electric currents. Transcranial TECHNOLOGY FEATURE © 2 0 1 7 M a c m i l l a n P u b l i s h e r s L i m i t e d , p a r t o f S p r i n g e r N a t u r e . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .

Key Points Multiple enhancers identified at the Ikzf1 locus with shared and distinct epigenetic and transcriptional properties. Transcription factor networks that distinguish between LMPP-specific and T cell–specific Ikzf1 enhancers.

Neuroscientists are starting to share and integrate databut shifting to a team approach isn't easy. Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging is just one of many data types that researchers are working out how to handle to bring the brain into focus.