The existence of normal sleep in patients in a vegetative state is still a matter of debate. Previous electrophysiological sleep studies in patients with disorders of consciousness did not differentiate patients in a vegetative state from patients in a minimally conscious state. Using high-density electroencephalographic sleep recordings, 11 patients with disorders of consciousness (six in a mi...

This paper reports on recent progress in the development of system to group populations of vegetative cuttings. The system is required to assign a classification to cuttings such that they appear uniform after a growing period based on single two-dimensional monochrome images. We have developed a fast segmentation technique that is able to measure plant features and a supervised learning scheme...

Canopy chlorophyll content (Chl) closely relates to plant photosynthetic capacity, nitrogen status and productivity. The goal of this study is to develop remote sensing techniques for accurate estimation of canopy Chl during the entire growing season without re-parameterization of algorithms for two contrasting crop species, maize and soybean. These two crops represent different biochemical mec...

The diagnosis of persistent or permanent vegetative state (PVS) raises ethical and legal problems. Strict adherence to the doctrine of the sanctity of life would require carers to continue to maintain the individual, perhaps for many years. However, few would regard this as an appropriate outcome when the person clearly has no capacity to interact with the environment and has no likelihood of r...

For most of human history, there was no perceived problem in determining whether a person was alive or dead. If the person had stopped breathing and had no heartbeat, he was considered dead. During the twentieth century, however, techniques were developed that made it possible to resuscitate some people who had stopped breathing and whose heart had stopped beating. With the invention of mechani...

years of the North Karelia study the mortality from cardio-vascular disease in women aged 30 to 64 fell from 2 5 to 1-7 per 1000 person years compared with a fall from 7-7 to 6-3 in men. 19 Mortality from stroke fell in women by half, and this is likely to be sustained by the continuing fall in blood pressure .8 A 12 year follow up study in Gothenburg of 1462 women found that 13% of women at ba...

to make judgments about awareness or consciousness based on these results; however, it is clear that she not only perceived visual stimuli, but also processed them to recognise content that was not based on primary image attributes such as colour, brightness, size, or movement. Further studies may more closely correlate functional imaging with behavioural assessment, electrophysiological findin...