We recently obtained the highest-resolution 3D images of the human brain ever taken from outside the skull. This is the first look.
Introducing Aleph, a research lab building brain interfaces for the telepathic future. (1/n)
There are only a few ways to image the brain without surgery: electricity, magnets, light, sound. All existing methods either produce blurry images or require a room-sized machine.
Our image is captured with ultrasound transmitted through the skull, with a contrast agent.
Human brains have remained the same for 100,000 years. But language has changed what we do with them unrecognizably. We care, we express ourselves, we inherit the revolutions of past humans through language.
We are not yet done! The next step is to communicate in latents—the raw thoughts that words can only approximate.
We believe telepathy will be as important and as natural as words and hands. It is perhaps the only technology with the hope of expanding human intelligence and connection like language once did.
We think this problem is newly tractable.
In 2023, MindEye showed astonishing reconstructions of seen images from fMRI brain data.
On the left: the image that was shown to a subject. On the right: the image predicted from the subject’s brain activity.
Resolution matters for decoding the brain. In theory, ultrasound can achieve the specs needed for decoding the brain: mm-resolution and wide brain coverage, accomplishing what fMRI can do as a device that fits in the palm of your hand. Ultrasound-on-a-chip technology from @ButterflyNetInc makes it possible.
While the device will not use microbubbles or superresolution techniques, the image shows just how much information ultrasound carries through the skull and serves as ground truth.
Right now, we are collecting the largest non-contrast neurovascular ultrasound dataset.
Our results today are the first super-resolution 3D images of blood flow in the human brain with an intact skull using contrast agents. It is the first step towards a non-contrast telepathy device.
We know that there will be many applications of transcranial microbubble imaging beyond what we’re working on, such as stroke detection.
Therefore, we are open-sourcing our pipeline behind these images.
Read more in our blogpost: alephneuro.com/blog/ultrasoun…
All this was done with a small team of 5. We’re hiring.
The work is hard, but this future is so curious, so incisively at the center of what it means to be human, that it would be heartbreaking to look away.
alephneuro.com
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