Functional Mapping of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex Using Transcranial Focused Ultrasound: Advancing Mental Health Treatments Through Noninvasive Neuromodulation

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays an integral role in brain functions such as attention, emotion, decision-making, and cognitive control. However, the functional specialization of its subregions remains unclear due to methodological limitations in existing literature in this sphere and a lack of neuromodulatory techniques that can precisely target deep brain regions such as the ACC. Here we investigate the efficacy of transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) as a noninvasive neuromodulation tool for mapping the functional roles of dorsal and rostral ACC subregions. Combining high-resolution neuromodulation with electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioral tasks, this study demonstrates that tFUS can selectively enhance cognitive performance in reward-biased contexts, particularly through stimulation of the dorsal ACC (dACC). It was found that stimulation of the dACC led to changes in reward-biased decision-making tasks, providing preliminary evidence for its potential role in motivated control allocation. Stimulation of the rACC produced subtler effects, suggesting a more specific contribution to emotional valuation and affective processing. From these findings, it can be stated that tFUS can be used not only as a research tool for identifying subregional specializations of the ACC but potentially as a therapeutic technique for targeting ACC-related dysfunction in psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, and ADHD.