This summary consists of the work performed throughout the whole action. That work has been crystallized in a shared first-author publication by the grantee:
Demertzi*, E. Tagliazucchi*, S. Dehaene, G. Deco, P. Barttfeld, F. Raimondo, C. Martial, D. Fernández-Espejo, B. Rohaut, H. U. Voss, N. D. Schiff, A. M. Owen, S. Laureys, L. Naccache, & J. D. Sitt (* equal contribution) (2019). Human consciousness is supported by dynamic complex patterns of brain signal coordination. Science Advances, 5,:2, eaat7603.
This work represents a large collaborative effort coordinated, in large part, by the grantee. It is a complete milestone in the field, involving functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) on patients with disorders of consciousness (unresponsive wakefulness syndrome: UWS, and minimally conscious state: MCS) from the following centers: Paris (ICM - INSERM, the beneficiary institution), Liege (the Coma Research Group, PI: Steven Laureys), New York (Cornell University, PI: Nicholas Schiff), and Canada (The Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, PI: Adrian Owen). The grantee has worked on processing the data, implementing computational algorithms, obtaining results, creating all figures, and drafting several versions of the manuscript, including the final version. This work provides evidence of certain time-resolved events in the inter-areal coordination of brain activity whose prevalence correlates with the level of conscious awareness, as inferred by expert neurological examination. Different validation sets were used to show that these events represent robust and generalizable signatures of consciousness.
This work was disseminated to a broad audience by means of press releases issued by all the participating institutions, and was covered by different news portals, magazines and radios throughout the english speaking world. Some illustrative examples are the following:
https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/06/detecting-consciousness-in-flickering-brain-signals/(si apre in una nuova finestra)https://www.news.uliege.be/cms/c_10717369/en/the-way-our-brains-self-organize-across-time-determines-our-state-of-consciousness(si apre in una nuova finestra)Two yet unpublished studies related to the aims of the present action are underway. In the first, we combine offline EEG and fMRI multimodal recordings to investigate whether the spectral changes in the EEG that are frequently used as markers of consciousness in brain injured patients correlate with region-specific changes in large-scale functional connectivity. In the second, we implement computational models of large-scale brain activity with the purpose of inferring “hidden parameters“ in the neuroimaging recordings (e.g. levels of excitation/inhibition) that have diagnostic power.
