BACKGROUND The minimally conscious state (MCS) resulting from severe brain damage refers to a subset of patients who demonstrate unequivocal, but intermittent, behavioral evidence of awareness of self or their environment. Although clinical examination may suggest residual cognitive function, neurobiological correlates of putative cognition in MCS have not been demonstrated. OBJECTIVE To test...

Abstract Some of my mental states are conscious and some them not. Sometimes I am so focused on the wine in front me that unaware thinking about it. But sometimes, course, take a reflexive step back become aware me. What marks difference between state an unconscious one? In this article, author focuses Durand St.-Pourçain’s rejection higher-order theory consciousness, according to which act is ...

The intersection graph $mathbb{Int}(A)$ of an $S$-act $A$ over a semigroup $S$ is an undirected simple graph whose vertices are non-trivial subacts of $A$, and two distinct vertices are adjacent if and only if they have a non-empty intersection. In this paper, we study some graph-theoretic properties of $mathbb{Int}(A)$ in connection to some algebraic properties of $A$. It is proved that the fi...

OBJECTIVES Patients with locked-in syndrome often self-report a higher quality of life than generally expected. This study reports third-person attitudes towards several salient issues on locked-in syndrome. METHODS Close-ended survey among conference attendees from 33 European countries. Analysis included chi-square tests and logistic regressions. RESULTS From the 3332 respondents (33% phy...

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...

We review the emerging applications of functional and structural neuroimaging techniques for the assessment of patients with disorders of consciousness. Measurements of brain function from patients in the vegetative state (VS) and minimally conscious state (MCS) are compared, and a conceptual organization is developed that suggests models of brain mechanisms associated with different functional...

Advances in the development of new paradigms as well as in neuroimaging techniques nowadays enable us to make inferences about the level of consciousness patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) retain. They, moreover, allow to predict their probable development. Today, we know that certain brain responses (e.g., event-related potentials or oscillatory changes) to stimulation, circadian r...

Modern intensive care medicine has greatly increased the rates of survival after severe brain injury (BI). Nonetheless, a number of patients fail to fully recover from coma, and awaken to a disorder of consciousness (DOC) such as the vegetative state (VS) or the minimally conscious state (MCS) [1]. In these conditions, which can be transient or last indefinitely, patients can lose virtually all...

OBJECTIVE Conventional assessments of consciousness rely on motor responses to indicate awareness. However, overt behaviors may be absent or ambiguous in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) resulting in underrating capacity for cognition. fMRI during a silent picture-naming task was evaluated as an indicator of command following when conventional methods are not sufficient. METHODS...