Background Acute brain damage can cause major disturbances of consciousness, ranging
all the way to the persistent vegetative state (PVS), which is also known as” unresponsive …

In recent years, a number of new neuroimaging techniques have detected covert awareness
in some patients previously thought to be in a vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness …

At rest, the brain is traversed by spontaneous functional connectivity patterns. Two
hypotheses have been proposed for their origins: they may reflect a continuous stream of …

Despite advances in resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging investigations,
clinicians remain with the challenge of how to implement this paradigm on an individualized …

Introduction Patients in a vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (VS/UWS)
open their eyes spontaneously, but show only reflexive behavior. Although VS/UWS is one …

Despite rapid advances in the study of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) in recent decades,
two fundamental challenges, namely, improvement of target detection performance and …

Our ability to identify covert cognitive abilities in non-communicating patients is of prime
importance to improve diagnosis, to guide therapeutic decisions and to better predict their …

Objective: We employed functional MRI (fMRI) to assess whether (1) patients with disorders
of consciousness (DOC) retain the ability to willfully engage in top-down processing and (2) …

The intrinsic connectivity of the default mode network has been associated with the level of
consciousness in patients with severe brain injury. Especially medial parietal regions are …

Background Despite evidence from neuroimaging research, diagnosis and early prognosis
in the vegetative (VS/UWS) and minimally conscious (MCS) states still depend on the …