The Clinical Utility of fMRI for Identifying Covert Awareness in the Vegetative State: A Comparison of Sensitivity between 3T and 1.5T

Davinia Fernández-Espejo, Loretta Norton and Adrian M Owen

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 4, 1-9

Abstract: In the last few years, mental imagery fMRI paradigms have been used successfully to identify covert command-following and awareness in some patients who are thought to be entirely vegetative. However, to date there is only evidence supporting their use at magnetic fields of 3T, which limits their applicability in clinical settings where lower field strengths are typically used. Here, we test the ‘gold standard’ fMRI paradigm for detecting residual awareness in non-responsive patients by comparing its sensitivity at 1.5T and 3T in the same group of healthy volunteers. We were able to successfully detect brain activity showing command-following in most participants at both 3T and 1.5T, with similar reliability. These results demonstrate that fMRI assessment of covert awareness is clinically viable and therefore justify a broader use of these methods in standard assessments in severely brain injured patients.

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095082 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 95082&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0095082

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095082

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().