New imaging technology will improve treatment for chronic back pain.

New technology developed to capture high resolution images of the human spinal cord during surgery will enable more effective treatment and hopefully bring relief for people with chronic back pain.

The technology is called functional ultrasound imaging, or fUSI, and it allows clinicians to see the spinal cord and map its response to treatment in real time.

According to a new paper in the journal Neuron, fUSI was tested on 6 patients undergoing electrical stimulation of the spinal cord for treatment of chronic lower back pain and was shown to detect blood flow changes with unprecedented detail.

“The fUSI scanner is freely mobile across various settings and eliminates the requirement for the extensive infrastructure associated with classical neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),” says Vasileios Christopoulos, assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of California Riverside, who helped develop the technology.