Functional ultrasound neuroimaging reveals mesoscopic organization of saccades in the lateral intraparietal area

The lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP), contained within the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), is crucial for transforming spatial information into saccadic eye movements, yet its functional organization for movement direction remains unclear. Here, we used functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI), a technique with high sensitivity, large spatial coverage, and good spatial resolution, to map movement direction encoding across the PPC by recording local changes in cerebral blood volume within PPC as two male monkeys performed memory-guided saccades. Our analysis revealed a heterogeneous organization where small patches of neighboring LIP cortex encoded different directions. These subregions demonstrated consistent tuning across several months to years. A rough topography emerged where anterior LIP represented more contralateral downward movements and posterior LIP represented more contralateral upward movements. These results address two fundamental gaps in our understanding of LIP’s functional organization: the neighborhood organization of patches and the stability of these populations across long periods of time. By tracking LIP populations over extended periods, we developed mesoscopic maps of direction specificity previously unattainable with fMRI or electrophysiology methods.