Vegetative State Man 'Talks' By Brain Scan

c0lo writes "'Severely brain-injured Scott Routley hasn't spoken in 12 years. None of his physical assessments since then have shown any sign of awareness, or ability to communicate, thus being diagnosed as vegetative (vegetative patients emerge from a coma into a condition where they have periods awake, with their eyes open, but have no perception of themselves or the outside world).' Scott Routley was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine. British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Owen said Mr Routley was clearly not vegetative. 'Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind. We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is.' As a consequence, medical textbooks would need to be updated to include Prof Owen's techniques, because only observational assessments (as opposed to using mind-readers) of Mr. Routley have continued to suggest he is vegetative. Functional MRI machines are expensive (up to $2 million), but it's quite possible that a portable high-end EEG machine, costing about $75,000, can be used at a patient's bedside. Phillip K. Dick's world is one step closer."

Comments

I'm loath to ask:

[newcastlejon]

Will they ask him if he wants to die?

Re:I'm loath to ask:

[geekoid]

Not me. Keep me going. I would rather be bored then dead. They might be able to cure me someday.

In the mean time please leave the TV on. maybe get an EKG machine that lets me interface with a computer.

You sir, are a quitter.

Re:I'm loath to ask:

[pwizard2]

You're assuming quite a bit. What if the parts of your brain that process visual/audio data are damaged and don't work anymore? Just how useful would TV be in that situation? Think about it... you would be trapped in a dark abyss entirely inside your head, unable to see or hear any stimulus. Even if people come to visit you, you would never know because you couldn't see or hear them. Yes, death would be preferable.

Sounds like a match.

[olsmeister]

Sounds like a great use for something like this. But, have fun getting insurance to cover it...

fMRI has problems

[capedgirardeau]

fMRI has problems and is very subject to interpretation, misuse and manipulation.

For example the now classic dead fish fMRI tests:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

I am very skeptical of this until it has been repeated, tested and evaluated in other settings by different researchers.

For some reason when reading the story, it really reminded me of "facilitated communication" which is a terrible, cruel scam non-communicative and vegetative or near vegetative state people are subject to. I realize this is different, but really not very different.

False positive?

[xlsior]

Just because they got results, doesn't mean that there's any conscious thought going on.

Case in point: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
"So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”

The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”

If that were all that had occurred, the salmon scanning would simply live on in Dartmouth lore as a “crowning achievement in terms of ridiculous objects to scan.” But the fish had a surprise in store. When they got around to analyzing the voxel (think: 3-D or “volumetric” pixel) data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon’s tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown."