Further development of an EEG based communication device for patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) could benefit from addressing the following gaps in knowledge-first, an evaluation of different types of motor imagery; second, an evaluation of passive feet movement as a mean of an initial classifier setup; and third, rapid delivery of biased feedback. To that end we investigated whethe...

Thanks to advances in medical care, an increased number of patients recover from coma. However, some remain in vegetative/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome or in a minimally conscious state. Detection of awareness in severely brain-injured patients is challenging because it relies on behavioral assessments, which can be affected by motor, sensory and cognitive impairments of the patients. Other...

The neural mechanisms underlying electrophysiological changes observed in patients with disorders of consciousness following a coma remain poorly understood. The aim of this study is to investigate the mechanisms underlying the differences in spontaneous electroencephalography (EEG) between patients in vegetative/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, minimally conscious state, emergence of the min...

This paper examines the claim that patients in coma, vegetative state and minimally conscious state may in fact be conscious. The topic is of great importance for a number of reasons--not least ethical. As soon as we know a given creature has any experiences at all, our ethical attitude towards it changes completely. A number of recent experiments looking for signs of intact or partially intact...

Severe brain injury affects tens of thousands of Canadians each year, leaving a small but significant proportion who survive the acute phase in a vegetative state (VS) or minimally conscious state (MCS). Patients in both VS and MCS have diurnal patterns of sleep-wake cycles, but have no behavioral response (VS) or only an inconsistent response (MCS) to stimuli. New technological capabilities of...

In a foundational study published in this issue of Annals of Neurology, Fernández-Espejo et al1 report that diagnostic categories of disorders of consciousness can be stratified by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of connections among specific components of the defaultmode network (DMN).2 The DMN includes the corticocortical and thalamocortical connections of the medial prefrontal, posterior medi...