Summary
It’s a case study on use of fMRI to detect the awareness in the vegetative state and discuss the implications on neurology and neuroscience. The article discusses about 2 patients, who meet with traumatic brain injury, showed sleep-wake cycles, preserved reflexes, cognitive simulations underwent fMRI study. The fMRI task is to imagine an activity, that elicit expected cortical regions pertaining to the activity and supplementary motor area representing movement. An earlier study on healthy volunteers exhibited distinguishable cortical activity based on the imagined task. The task relevant cortical activation can support the explanation that the preserved cognitive function in vegetative patients. This also supports the interest to study reverse …show more content…
to interpret the imagined activity from the cortical activations in the brain.
Good
• It’s an interesting case report., not only about vegetative state but about mind reading.
What I think? [1] PET was used to find the activation of FFA (fusiform face area) when showed familiar faces to a brain infected patient, who went to vegetative state, to declare that she is well alive. The patient responded well and recovered mostly. Almost 20 % of vegetative state patients can communicate. [2] Its interesting to know, the task is done in a hierarchical manner, sound, speech and comprehension. [3] PET showed consistent metabolic with 32 % (n=13) of 41 vegetative patients, compared to low sensitivity of the fMRI based on imagining study. Interesting to note 59% of patients completed fMRI task against 91% task completion in PET. He mentioned, that’s because fMRI tasks require work many functional aspect of brain to get detectable BOLD response, compared to metabolic activity of FDG PET, therefore should not be compared
It’s a case study on use of fMRI to detect the awareness in the vegetative state and discuss the implications on neurology and neuroscience. The article discusses about 2 patients, who meet with traumatic brain injury, showed sleep-wake cycles, preserved reflexes, cognitive simulations underwent fMRI study. The fMRI task is to imagine an activity, that elicit expected cortical regions pertaining to the activity and supplementary motor area representing movement. An earlier study on healthy volunteers exhibited distinguishable cortical activity based on the imagined task. The task relevant cortical activation can support the explanation that the preserved cognitive function in vegetative patients. This also supports the interest to study reverse …show more content…
to interpret the imagined activity from the cortical activations in the brain.
Good
• It’s an interesting case report., not only about vegetative state but about mind reading.
What I think? [1] PET was used to find the activation of FFA (fusiform face area) when showed familiar faces to a brain infected patient, who went to vegetative state, to declare that she is well alive. The patient responded well and recovered mostly. Almost 20 % of vegetative state patients can communicate. [2] Its interesting to know, the task is done in a hierarchical manner, sound, speech and comprehension. [3] PET showed consistent metabolic with 32 % (n=13) of 41 vegetative patients, compared to low sensitivity of the fMRI based on imagining study. Interesting to note 59% of patients completed fMRI task against 91% task completion in PET. He mentioned, that’s because fMRI tasks require work many functional aspect of brain to get detectable BOLD response, compared to metabolic activity of FDG PET, therefore should not be compared