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A team of engineers and surgeons from Johns Hopkins Medicine has published its first proof-of-concept study that shows temporarily implanting a tiny ultrasonic device into the location of a spinal cord injury can be feasible, safe and potentially useful. These findings, which mark an early midpoint in a multitiered research journey to develop and study how the device could be used in clinical care, were published in Science Advances.

"When the biology of spinal cord injury is local, our devices should also be able to track and treat local physiology," says Amir Manbachi, the principal investigator and an associate professor of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The device that Manbachi and researchers developed and studied, which is called Multimodal Ultrasound System for Injury Care (MUSIC), is designed to enhance feedback about what is happening at and around the site of injury following surgery and to support clinical decisions about care when a patient is recovering in the intensive care unit.

Manbachi explains that the ultimate goal of developing and studying the device is to identify a way to support people while they are in the hospital and minimize risks for complications, such as experiencing a stroke, becoming blind or losing additional control of movement, that they may face when recovering from a spinal cord injury.

To achieve this, the device was designed to double as a "mobile MRI" that could alleviate the need to move immobile patients in the days following their recovery, while providing on-demand and as-needed feedback to medical teams, as opposed to single points in time.

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