Wednesday, August 03, 2022

EEG detects hidden consciousness in traumatic brain-injured patients

Good news! Less guess work in the future!

"Researchers in the US have shown how brainwaves detected in unresponsive patients can help predict if and when they will make a full recovery from traumatic brain injury. ...
For clinically unresponsive patients who have suffered from traumatic brain injury, it can be incredibly difficult for doctors to predict how long it will take for them to fully recover. ...
Studies have shown that even if patients with traumatic brain injury can’t respond to verbal commands directly, their brainwaves indicate that they are aware of them to at least some extent. In this case, patients are said to be in a state of “covert consciousness”. ...
In their study ... with 193 intensive care patients with traumatic brain injury, all of whom were unresponsive to verbal commands at the start of the study. To identify covert consciousness in the patients, the researchers applied machine learning to their EEG recordings – allowing them to distinguish whether the brainwaves appearing after verbal commands to “keep moving” were different from those triggered by instructions to “stop moving”.
In total, the researchers identified brainwaves associated with covert consciousness in 27 of the patients. Out of this group, 41% had made a full recovery after just one year; while nearly all of them showed visible signs of improvement after just three months. In contrast, just 10% of patients without covert consciousness had made a full recovery over the same period. ..."

From the abstract:
"... Recovery trajectories of clinically unresponsive patients diagnosed with cognitive-motor dissociation early after brain injury are distinctly different from those without cognitive-motor dissociation. A diagnosis of cognitive-motor dissociation could inform the counselling of families of clinically unresponsive patients, and it could help clinicians to identify patients who will benefit from rehabilitation. ..."

EEG detects hidden consciousness in brain-injured patients – Physics World

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