eSonic Launches Brain-Computer Interface Platform: Sino-French Partnership Advances Noninvasive Ultrasound BCI to 'Read' the Brain

BEIJING, Oct. 22, 2026

Chinese ultrasound-imaging company eSonic officially launched its brain-computer interface platform on Wednesday and signed a strategic cooperation agreement with a team of French scientists led by Mickael Tanter, a pioneer in the field of noninvasive neural technology.

The signing ceremony, held in Beijing, marks a significant step in Sino-French collaboration in frontier brain science. eSonic Chairman Jacques Souquet—an academician of the French National Academy of Technologies—CEO Le Bin, and the company's ultrasound platform research chief attended the event and signed the documents. The French delegation included Dr. Mathieu Pernot and Dr. Clement Papadacci, co-founders of Tanter's team, whose portfolio of brain-computer interface brands includes Iconeus and Sonomind.

The partnership will see eSonic extend its fifth-generation ultrafast ultrasound platform, known as ePascal, into brain-computer interface applications and frontier scientific research. The ePascal platform has already been deployed at leading international research institutions, according to the company.

From 'Reading Structure' to 'Reading Intent'

Traditional ultrasound imaging has long been constrained by its reliance on anatomical structure visualization, unable to detect microscopic lesions or provide quantitative diagnostic standards. The technology is now undergoing a generational shift—from merely "seeing structure" to "measuring function."

Functional ultrasound imaging, or fUS, was first proposed by Professor Tanter's team in 2011. The technique uses ultrafast Doppler imaging to capture changes in cerebral microvascular blood flow at micrometer-level resolution, thereby indirectly measuring neural activity. In experiments, the Tanter team found that fUS can achieve a spatial resolution of 100 micrometers with signal change rates of 20% to 30%—significantly outperforming functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which typically shows signal changes of only 2% to 3%. Moreover, fUS does not require animals to be restrained inside large scanning equipment, opening new possibilities for studying brain function in freely moving subjects.

eSonic's proprietary F-ultrasound technology builds on the company's ultrafast plane-wave ultrasound platform and employs a dual CPU-GPU computing architecture. The system achieves a data acquisition frame rate of 25,000 frames per second with micrometer-level spatial resolution, and can perform noninvasive brain signal acquisition even through the skull. The company's core team is led by Academician Souquet, who came to China to establish the enterprise. eSonic's earlier E-ultrasound quantitative elastography products have already obtained multiple regulatory certifications and been adopted by hundreds of top-tier hospitals across China.

Noninvasive Ultrasound BCI: Pursuing the 'Impossible Triangle'

Current brain-computer interface technologies fall into three categories. Invasive BCIs require craniotomy and direct cortical implantation, yielding the finest signals but carrying significant surgical risks and long-term stability concerns. Semi-invasive approaches place electrodes between the skull and the cortex, balancing safety and precision—a common route for clinical applications today. Noninvasive systems collect signals through the scalp, offering safety and ease of deployment, but skull attenuation limits their spatial resolution.

Noninvasive ultrasound BCI represents an emerging approach that attempts to break through this bottleneck, simultaneously pursuing noninvasiveness, deep tissue penetration, and submillimeter resolution in a reversible, repeatable format.

In 2024, Professor Tanter's team further demonstrated the bidirectional potential of ultrasound technology. Beyond "reading" brain activity, the researchers used sonogenetics to preliminarily validate ultrasound's ability to "write" to the brain—raising the possibility of "imprinting" images onto the visual cortex and potentially restoring sight to the blind.

China Enters the Global BCI Race

Under the agreement, the two sides will collaborate deeply in the brain-computer interface field, combining eSonic's ultrasound technology platform with the Tanter laboratory's research expertise in functional ultrasound BCI to jointly advance clinical translation and industrial deployment of the technology.

In the F-ultrasound segment, eSonic possesses full-stack in-house research and commercialization capabilities. The company's plane-wave imaging acquisition frame rate of 25,000 frames per second is among the world's leading. Its E-ultrasound products already cover more than 70% of China's top-tier hospitals, and the company is backed by what it describes as the world's first general-purpose ultrasound large language model.

The signing signals that Chinese companies are now entering the global competition for foundational brain-computer interface technologies via the "noninvasive ultrasound reading" route. eSonic, leveraging its ultrafast platform, is positioning itself to evolve from a provider of ultrasound imaging equipment into a builder of brain-computer interface and scientific research infrastructure platforms.

About eSonic

eSonic was founded in China by Academician Jacques Souquet and is led by a Sino-French academician team. The company is recognized as a national high-tech enterprise. Leveraging GPU-based high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, eSonic has achieved a generational leap from traditional color ultrasound to E-ultrasound and F-ultrasound technologies. Built on shear-wave elastography and an ultrasound AI large model standard, the company's products span portable, semi-desktop, and desktop systems, enabling biomarker-level quantitative diagnostic precision in ultrasound imaging.