First-in-human low-intensity focused ultrasound targeting striatal circuits in schizophrenia: feasibility, safety, and effects on hallucinations and striatal-temporal functional connectivity

This first-in-human study demonstrates that deep striatal LIFU is safe, feasible, and produces functional-connectivity changes accompanied by hallucination severity reductions in SZ. The convergence of symptom improvement with reduced striatal-STC coupling provides mechanistic proof-of-concept evidence that this circuit provides a promising biomarker and therapeutic LIFU target in psychosis and motivates larger sham-controlled trials to test the causal role of striatal circuitry in hallucination generation in SZ.