The Pinton Lab

pinton-lab / research

From wave physics to the clinic

Six programs, one spine. We describe how waves really move through the body, then image and treat with that knowledge.

Imaging

Super-resolution ultrasound

Ultrasound localization microscopy at ultra-high frame rates, mapping brain vasculature through the skull at resolutions conventional beamforming can't reach.

Functional imaging

Functional ultrasound

Reading brain activity through neurovascular coupling, with ultrafast Doppler maps of blood volume that localize function down to super-resolved individual vessels.

Therapy

Ultrasound neuromodulation

Focused transcranial arrays for simultaneous multifocus stimulation, with models that trace the acoustic field down to per-voxel neural firing.

Injury biomechanics

Shear shock waves & TBI

Shear waves steepen into destructive shocks inside soft brain tissue. We image them in situ and model their role in traumatic brain injury.

Machine learning

Physics-informed ML

The ground truth in medical imaging is unknown, so we train on physics. Networks learn from Fullwave-simulated data to estimate sound speed, suppress reverberation, and see what beamforming can't.

Quantitative imaging

Lung ultrasound

Quantitative aeration mapping of the lung, reconstructed from raw RF data with physics-trained machine learning, replacing the qualitative scoring of conventional lung ultrasound.

whole-brain super-resolution doppler Half a million microvascular tracks across the rat brain, with a dive into the vasculature.

focusing through the human skull A bowl transducer's wavefield transmits through the CT-derived skull, aberrates at the bone, and converges to a focus inside the brain.

vascular territories Whole-brain super-resolution vasculature with anatomical regions rendered in distinct colors.

pinton-lab / software · github.com/pinton-lab

The lab on GitHub

Simulated ultrasound field focusing through the abdominal wall, from the repository's example figures

fullwave25

Fullwave 2.5 simulates ultrasound wave propagation with heterogeneous power-law attenuation and nonlinearity.

Python

shearwave

Viscoelastic FDTD shear-wave solver with Kelvin–Voigt damping (NumPy + JAX), for elastography and neuromodulation modeling.

Python

ultraneuron

From transcranial acoustic field to per-voxel neural firing maps, via mechanosensitive channels, intramembrane cavitation, and multi-pathway Hodgkin–Huxley dynamics.

Python

Transcranial beam fields compared across methods, from the manuscript

angularspectrum_heterogeneous

Angular-spectrum wave propagation through heterogeneous media.

Python

3D renderings of skull-surface acoustic transparency from the manuscript

skull_transparency

Focusing ultrasound through the skull, with array placement, registration, and transcranial field simulation from microCT.

Python

bioheat_ultrasound

Bioheat modeling of ultrasound-induced tissue heating.

Python

Simulated B-mode ultrasound image, from the repository's figures

us_degrade_reconstruction

Ultrasound image degradation and reconstruction.

Python

Illustrative wavefront motif, not lab data

fullwave2-ultra

Part of the Fullwave simulation family.

Python

3D sound speed and attenuation maps of the abdominal wall

abdominal_phantom_applications

Applications of acoustic abdominal phantoms.

MATLAB

tuba

TUBA, the transcranial ultrasound brain atlas, registers skull microCT to canonical brain atlases across species, from mouse to human.

Python

pinton-lab / in-vivo

Imaging disease as it develops

Non-invasive, longitudinal studies that watch microvasculature and function change over weeks, in the same animal.

Whole-brain super-resolution microbubble-count maps comparing wild-type and Alzheimer's-model mice across matched coronal, sagittal, and axial slices — wild-type vs Alzheimer's model Whole-brain super-resolution microbubble-count maps across matched slices (WT left, AD right).

Alzheimer's disease

Vascular change, tracked non-invasively

Volumetric ultrasound localization microscopy detects cerebrovascular changes in Alzheimer's-model mice, followed longitudinally through the intact skull. Theranostics 2025 →

Glioblastoma

A tumor's vasculature, scan by scan

Super-resolution imaging quantified the microvascular development of mouse brain glioblastoma across 29 ultrasound scans, terabytes of RF data tracing angiogenesis as it happened.

pinton-lab / publications