The neural correlates of consciousness must be identified, but how? Anesthetics can be used as tools to dissect the nervous system. Anesthetics not only allow for the experimental investigation into the conscious-unconscious state transition, but they can also be titrated to subanesthetic doses in order to affect selected components of consciousness such as memory, attention, pain processing, o...

INTRODUCTION In healthy conditions, group-level fMRI resting state analyses identify ten resting state networks (RSNs) of cognitive relevance. Here, we aim to assess the ten-network model in severely brain-injured patients suffering from disorders of consciousness and to identify those networks which will be most relevant to discriminate between patients and healthy subjects. METHODS 300 fMRI...

A very troubling issue for health care systems today is that of life-sustaining treatment for patients who have permanently lost their cognitive capacities. These include patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS), or minimally conscious state (MCS), as well as a growing population of patients at the very end stage of dementia. These patients are totally dependent on life-sustaining treatmen...

brain injury due to cerebrovascular disorder, whos lives can be saved, has increased. Along with this phenomenon, however, the number of patients with persistent vegetative state has been increasing, and thus constitutes an important issue. No effective treatment method for persistent vegetative state has been established but some reports have recently shown that spinal epidural stimulation and...

In recent years, a number of studies have demonstrated an important role for functional neuroimaging in the identification of residual cognitive function in persistent vegetative state. Such studies, when successful, may be particularly useful where there is concern about the accuracy of the diagnosis and the possibility that residual cognitive function has remained undetected. Unfortunately, f...

The study of consciousness disorders is a scientific challenge, and clinical differentiation among the various sorts of alterations in consciousness is difficult. Persistent vegetative state was defined in 1972, but years later cases appeared in which diagnosed patients showed signs of cognitive activity, and therefore could not be considered vegetative. Minimally conscious state was defined in...

The minimally conscious state (MCS) is a clinical manifestation of severe brain injury. While there are no evidence-based criteria, diagnostic guidelines were reached in a series of consensus development workshops [1]. The differential diagnosis of the minimally conscious state is important and includes the vegetative state (transient, persistent and permanent), coma and the locked-in syndrome ...