Caroline Schnakers

TL;DR: Standardized neurobehavioral assessment is a more sensitive means of establishing differential diagnosis in patients with disorders of consciousness when compared to diagnoses determined by clinical consensus.

TL;DR: It is shown that default network connectivity is decreased in severely brain-damaged patients, in proportion to their degree of consciousness impairment, as well as in healthy controls and locked-in syndrome patients.

TL;DR: It is suggested that propofol-induced unconsciousness could be linked to a breakdown of cerebral temporal architecture that modifies both within- and between-network connectivity and thus prevents communication between low-level sensory and higher-order frontoparietal cortices, thought to be necessary for perception of external stimuli.

TL;DR: Results indicate a positive relationship between conscious perception of low-intensity somatosensory stimuli and immediately preceding levels of baseline activity in medial thalamus and the lateral frontoparietal network, respectively, which are thought to relate to vigilance and “external monitoring".

TL;DR: It is found that the only significant difference between patients in a vegetative state and controls was an impairment of backward connectivity from frontal to temporal cortices, which emphasizes the importance of top-down projections in recurrent processing that involve high-order associative cortices for conscious perception.