New Imaging Methods Reveal Brain-Injured Patients’ Ability to Communicate

Through the use of complex machine learning techniques to decipher repeated advanced brain scans, researchers at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell have been able to show that a patient with a severe brain injury could, in his or her own way, communicate accurately.

The study, which appears in the Feb. 13 issue of the Archives of Neurology, demonstrates how hard it is to determine whether a patient can communicate using only measured brain activity, even if it is possible for them to generate reliable patterns of brain activation in response to instructed commands. Researchers say that a patient in a minimally conscious state or who has locked-in syndrome (normal cognitive function with severe motor impairment) and can follow commands in the absence of a motor response may not generate clearly interpretable communications using the same patterns of brain activity. For more information, click here to read the full release.