Beamforming approaches for untethered, ultrasonic neural dust motes for cortical recording: A simulation study

In this paper, we examine the use of beamforming techniques to interrogate a multitude of neural implants in a distributed, ultrasound-based intra-cortical recording platform known as Neural Dust [1]. We propose a general framework to analyze system design tradeoffs in the ultrasonic beamformer that extracts neural signals from modulated ultrasound waves that are backscattered by free-floating neural dust (ND) motes. Simulations indicate that high-resolution linearly-constrained minimum variance beamforming sufficiently suppresses interference from unselected ND motes and can be incorporated into the ND-based cortical recording system.