Modular chronic cranial platform for longitudinal functional ultrasound, optical, and ECoG recording in a gyrencephalic model species
Understanding cortical function in large, gyrencephalic brains requires following the same tissue over time and interrogating it through complementary methods - yet in practice each recording modality is run on its own preparation, across separate animals and sessions that cannot be quantitatively related, while the recorded cortex can rarely be revisited. Functional ultrasound (fUS), widefield optical imaging, and electrocorticography (ECoG) are individually mature and strongly complementary, but no single preparation has combined all three within the same chronically accessible tissue in a gyrencephalic brain. Here we present a modular chronic cranial platform, validated in three cats with implants remaining functional for up to 3.3 years that unites these modalities in one customized chamber built around fUS as an anchor modality. The platform also supports fUS imaging in awake, head-unrestrained animals, with activation maps remaining spatially consistent across imaging days. By providing stable, quantitatively reproducible access to the same cortical region over time, this platform enables longitudinal, multimodal characterization of cortical function within individual subjects.