Expert Profiles

Bin He, PhD 

Key Points

  • Dr. He is a professor of biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. 
  • His laboratory is investigating the neuromodulatory effects of transcranial focused ultrasound and developing a bi-directional brain-computer interface. 

Bin He, PhD, is the Trustee Professor of Biomedical Engineering, professor of the Neuroscience Institute, and professor by courtesy of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The mission of his Biomedical Functional Imaging and Neuroengineering Laboratory is to develop and test advanced engineering technologies for biomedical applications. Beyond and combined with its imaging work, the He laboratory is developing neural interfaces for precision modulation and control and integrating them with focused ultrasound neuromodulation techniques. 

We recently interviewed Dr. He to learn more about his work developing transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation for the treatment of chronic pain and epilepsy. His most exciting project, however, may be the bi-directional brain-computer interface (BCI) he is designing and building. The BCI not only reads the brain intention using electrical sensing but also delivers focused ultrasound to modulate neural circuits to enhance brain decoding and control. 

Read more to learn about Dr. He’s fascinating research, including several projects that are moving into human clinical trials.

Where did you do your academic training, and how did you start your career? 
I completed my PhD working on brain electromagnetics in Japan (Tokyo Institute of Technology) and started my US career in the Boston area as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My faculty career began when I built my first laboratory at the University of Illinois–Chicago, where I worked on electrical mapping and source imaging of the brain and heart. 

After functional MRI became one of my major areas of research, I moved to the University of Minnesota, which has one of the best MRI centers in the country, in 2004. To achieve super resolution of a tissue’s electrical impedance, we developed a new technology to integrate ultrasound with magnetism and called it magneto-acoustic imaging. I spent about 10 years researching the use of ultrasound as an imaging modality. I began developing research interests in BCIs for mind control, integrating artificial intelligence and robotics, so I moved to Carnegie Mellon in 2018, attracted by its particular institutional strength in these areas. 

When and how did you become interested in neuromodulation? 
I began pursuing perturbation-based imaging with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) (i.e., give a stimulation, then do imaging; give another stimulation, then do imaging). We later realized that TMS and tDCS only provide several centimeters of spatial resolution so are not ideal for pursuing the perturbation-based imaging. I began to wonder whether I could leverage my ultrasound imaging expertise to simultaneously stimulate and image the brain. 

When did you switch to focused ultrasound neuromodulation? 
I learned about ultrasound neuromodulation from a research presentation. Using focused ultrasound instead of TMS or tDCS gave us millimeter-level spatial resolution for both humans and rodents. Ultrasound is the only noninvasive technology that has high spatial precision and also deep brain penetration. So, I shifted from being an imaging scientist by training to using ultrasound for its neuromodulation stimulation capabilities. 

I wrote my first focused ultrasound grant application, and it was funded by the National Science Foundation BRAIN Initiative in its original cohort of BRAIN EAGER grantees in 2014. That grant helped us make some exciting discoveries on the interactions of focused ultrasound and electromagnetics. Later on, we were funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative grants on focused ultrasound neuromodulation and have continued this work since then. 

Do you use any other mechanisms of focused ultrasound besides neuromodulation?  
No, my laboratory is only pursing neuromodulation applications at this time, primarily for mechanistic study and for applications in managing pain and epilepsy. 

What is the overall goal of your work? 
Our focused ultrasound research is mechanistic in nature. We use in vivo animal models to try to understand cell type selectivity and network connectivity. We also use electroencephalogram (EEG) source imaging to investigate the neuromodulatory effects of focused ultrasound in humans. We believe that if we truly understand its underlying mechanisms, we can make better applications of the technology. So, my overall goal is to better understand how focused ultrasound works on a cellular and circuit level and to further establish and develop it as a translational technology that can benefit many, many human patients—or even the general population in the future. 

You have been able to show cell-type selectivity with neurons? 
Yes, our neuroscience research allowed us to report for the first time that transcranial focused ultrasound has cell-type selectivity when modulating the central nervous system. Using an in vivo rodent model, we showed that the pulse reputation frequency of focused ultrasound is proportional to the neural firing rate of excitatory cells in the somatosensory cortex. Using optogenetics, we showed that focused ultrasound can selectively activate excitatory or inhibitory cells. 

What are your primary research interests? 
My main research interest is to establish systems neuroengineering for noninvasive imaging, modulating, and interfacing with the brain. I am developing a bi-directional BCI device that reads the brain and also modulates the central nervous system. My idea is to do both with one device. Different researchers use different terminologies but, to me, ultrasound neuromodulation, brain decoding, and robotic control are all one major intellectual theme. While many laboratories are developing focused ultrasound neuromodulation and others are working on brain decoding and brain control devices, we are integrating ultrasound with brain decoding in one BCI system. A traditional BCI, either invasively or noninvasively, does recording and decoding. We use ultrasound to modulate neural activity, thus enhancing the ability for a human to better control a robot or computer. 

Your BCI looks like a helmet or swimming cap. Tell us more about it. 
We work on noninvasive BCI using a wearable EEG cap embedded with a focused ultrasound device. We tested it in an area of the brain called V5, which is part of the visual cortex. Motion-onset visual evoked potentials are electrical signals in the brain that result in response to visual stimuli and have been used by other researchers for BCI decoding. Basically, the test involves using a flashing letter on a screen, which is a motion, because V5 is responsible for detecting motion. 

Our laboratory was the first to demonstrate that focused ultrasound could be used to stimulate V5 to significantly enhance the performance of motion-onset visual evoked potential BCI for communication. We conducted a controlled study with a group of human subjects, where we stimulated V5 with focused ultrasound versus various sham controls. What we found was that the only protocol that significantly boosted the performance of the BCI for communication was when the focused ultrasound was stimulating V5. This was true even when tested intra-session in the participants. 

On the technical side, we used a traditional EEG recording to read the electrophysiology signals during stimulation and then used imaging to localize the EEG signal to V5. The theta and alpha oscillation at V5 – and the dorsal pathway – all became significantly elevated when ultrasound stimulated V5, but not the other pathways (e.g., the ventral pathway). This proved that focused ultrasound directly intervened with neural information processing and manipulated the information processing pathway within the brain. We demonstrated all this with our bi-directional BCI device. 

How can you use your BCI to address problems in medicine? 
This is a great question. So, as you know, focused ultrasound can be used therapeutically to suppress pain, stop an epilepsy seizure, and in many, many other applications. The BCI can serve as assistive device to help patients with motor impairments gain independence and improve quality of life, or it could help with rehabilitation. 

Our BCI could also be used to enhance brain performance as a general assistive device. Like with a smartphone, every individual could benefit from using it. Similar to a Siri for my iPhone, it could help people in many ways. It is not just for clinical applications; it could be used for recreational applications or daily activities to improve quality of life. It could change the way we live. 

How can your BCI technology be commercialized? 
That will be some company’s job. We filed patent applications, as universities always do. When a company wants to license the technology, I will let them to do that so I can continue to enjoy conducting my original research. We recently had a US patent granted on the use of EEG and other means to guide transcranial focused ultrasound in personalized neuromodulation. 

What did you learn from your chronic pain studies that were funded by the NIH HEAL Initiative? 
For that line of work, we used a humanized mouse model of sickle cell disease that was developed by Kalpna Gupta, PhD, at the University of California, Irvine. I have collaborated with Dr. Gupta for more than 10 years to study sickle cell pain in rodents and patients. We showed that we could safely and effectively stimulate specific brain circuits to suppress hypersensitivity to pain. Our custom-designed, multi-element, highly focused random array transducer successfully targeted several cortical and deep brain structures associated with pain processing with submillimeter spatial precision. We showed the significant impact of focused ultrasound stimulation on brain oscillations in in vivo mouse models. 

How are you using neuromodulation to develop treatments for epilepsy? 
I have studied epilepsy over the course of my career, but mainly from an imaging perspective (i.e., with EEG or intracranial EEG to localize seizure activity and epileptic networks). We recently started to pursue non-surgical treatment options for drug-resistant epilepsy. Whereas the current standard of care is to use surgical resection to safely remove seizure networks in the brain, our idea is to leverage the high spatial resolution of focused ultrasound for its neuromodulation capabilities. We are conducting preclinical studies to determine whether focused ultrasound can significantly suppress seizure activity in the brain. Our data show that focused ultrasound modulation can significantly reduce percent time in seizure, seizure duration, and seizure count in rodents. 

Is your work moving into clinical trials? 
Yes, we are beginning to translate our findings to human applications and have been running several general neuroscience experiments in healthy subjects. Almost daily, and at least weekly, we enroll participants in our healthy subject study to test the neuromodulatory effects of focused ultrasound in human participants together with EEG recordings of various neuroscience paradigms (NCT03192436). We are also in the process of applying for IRB approval to begin a clinical study in patients with pain. 

How large is your research laboratory team? 
I currently have five postdoctoral research fellows, nine PhD students, one MS student, and one full-time technician in my lab. 

What are your current funding sources? 
All of my current funding support is from NIH. I hope it will continue. 

Who are your internal and external collaborators? 
I collaborate with a variety of investigators, depending on each individual project. I have: 

  • Ultrasound collaborators from the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California – Irvine, the University of Connecticut, and Rice University 
  • Neuroscientists with expertise on rodent models 
  • Primate collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh 
  • Epilepsy clinical collaborators from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center 

What is your greatest achievement? 
One is in developing EEG source imaging technology. I have spent my life to advance EEG research from being a one-dimensional sensing technique to a three-dimensional dynamic imaging technology. That work occupied many years of my life, and that is one thing I feel proud of, as source imaging has been widely used for neuroscience research and clinical management of neurological disorders, in particular for epilepsy management. 

Another is the noninvasive BCI techniques I am currently developing. We have already demonstrated many first-in-the-world achievements in BCI robotic control with this technology. We are further developing the bidirectional BCI, not just reading – but also stimulating, modulating – the central nervous system, all noninvasively. We are working hard toward this goal. 

Do you have any disappointments? 
I am not sure if I have any disappointments, but I strongly believe that in life everything will not always go as you wished. My research could progress faster than what I currently accomplish–it feels slower than I would like. 

What is on your research wish list? 
Relevant to focused ultrasound, the central stage of my laboratory research is to have a mechanistic understanding of its neuromodulatory effect and successfully build a bi-directional BCI device for brain decoding and ultrasound neuromodulation. Another wish is to make it possible for this device to successfully treat many diseases. 

Has the Focused Ultrasound Foundation played a role in your work? 
Not yet directly, but I am interested in learning more about its funding opportunities, workshops, and introduction opportunities. 

Selected Publications 

Related Stories 
NIH Publication Features Focused Ultrasound Pain Project March 2022 

NIH BRAIN Initiative Awards Multi-Year Grant for Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation Research October 2021 

Excitatory and Inhibitory Neuron Response to Transcranial Focused Ultrasound May 2021 

Five Sites Awarded Funding for Focused Ultrasound Research for Pain Management November 2019