Fig. 1

Setup and signal information. a The high sensitivity to cerebral blood volume (CBV) changes in fUS (functional ultrasound) imaging enable the single trial detection of supplementary eye field (SEF) activation during visual tasks. The animals performed in a row with baseline (rest phase), fixation, saccade, and antisaccade trials while CBV changes were recorded in fUS with a FOV of 10 × 14 mm. b fUS signal was recorded at a sampling frequency of 500 Hz the SEF region; below is the associated spectrum (fast Fourier transform) of the SEF signal during the visual task. Peaks frequency observed at 0.35 and 3.5 Hz are related to brain activity and cardiac pulsatility (~ 210 bpm), respectively (7 Hz is a harmonic frequency of cardiac pulsatility). To obtain a cleaner signal, cardiac pulsatility was first removed with a cutoff filter, and then a 250 ms sliding window with a time increment of 10 ms was applied in each pixel of the image. c Behavior signal consists of a sinusoid for which each period was defined by the time between trial start t_i and the following trial start t_i+1. Jitter and constant time were similar for all type of task; the only significant variation between visual tasks was the animal response time (RT). Each visual task was initialized by the animal (a, b), for saccade he has to hit the cue (c, d) whereas for antisaccade he has to hit the opposite side where the cue appeared (c, d) and finally for the fixation task (not represented in the figure) he has to keep its eye’s position on the initial cue. Depending on the result, the animal received a reward (e) and he then could initialize a new trial sequence (f–i)