Individual Singular Mode Functional Ultrasound for Somatosensory Conduction Detection of Spinal Cord

As a critical transfer hub for neural signals, the functional status of the spinal cord warrants serious consideration. The functional responses are transmitted through discrete fiber tracts. This unique structure makes these signals difficult to capture and highly susceptible to noise. Functional ultrasound imaging (fUS) has recently emerged as a novel tool for functional research in neuroscience. In the standard fUS processing pipeline, obtaining task-based functional responses involves administering repetitive stimulation and performing a correlation analysis between the cerebral blood volume and the stimulus paradigm. However, motion artifacts caused by physical stimulation are also periodic under repetitive stimuli. As a result, the accuracy and stability of function extraction can be greatly affected. In this study, singular value decomposition (SVD) -based functional analysis was applied to extract functional information from individual singular components. Validation was conducted both in rat brain and spinal cord. The results demonstrate the efficacy of SVD-based analysis in mitigating motion artifacts while preserving functional response, highlighting its potential for more complex studies involving spontaneous neural activities or awake animals.