Intense focused ultrasound stimulation can safely stimulate inflamed subcutaneous tissue and assess allodynia.

Background: Potential peripheral sources of deep pain can require invasive evocative tests for their assessment. Here we perform research whose ultimate goal is development of a non-invasive evocative test for deep painful tissue.

Methods: We used a rat model of inflammation to show that intense focused ultrasound (iFU) differentially stimulates inflamed versus control tissue and can identify allodynia.

Neuropathic tissue responds preferentially to stimulation by intense focused ultrasound.

We tested the hypothesis that neuropathic tissue is more sensitive to stimulation by intense focused ultrasound (iFU) than control tissue. We created a diffusely neuropathic paw in rats via partial ligation of the sciatic nerve, whose sensitivity to iFU stimulation we compared with sham-surgery and normal control paws. We then applied increasing amounts of iFU (individual 0.

Intense focused ultrasound can reliably induce sensations in human test subjects in a manner correlated with the density of their mechanoreceptors.

Sensations generated by intense focused ultrasound (iFU) can occur cutaneously and/or at depth, in contrast to other forms of stimulation (e.g., heat, electricity), whose action usually occurs only at the skin surface, or mechanical stimulation (e.