Deep Thinking

Your blood really gets pumping when you work out. But not just when you’re pushing your muscles. Whether you’re problem-solving or decision-making, when your brain is hard at work, more blood is pumped to its most active regions. And so, imaging the brain’s blood flow reveals its activity. Achieving this in blood vessels deep within the brain has proven challenging but is possible in anaesthetised mice thanks to ultrasound localisation microscopy (ULM). However, anaesthesia changes how vessels behave, widening them and increasing blood flow. Researchers now present an imaging platform for brain ULM (pictured) that keeps the awake mouse’s head in a fixed position, allowing blood flow through veins (blue) and arteries (yellow) to be captured. This means researchers can study the brain’s circulation in mice without the effects of anaesthesia, which can interfere with their results.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Yike Wang and colleagues
• Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife (reviewed preprint), October 2025