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New Tool To Measure Consciousness
bmahersciwriter writes "The line between consciousness and non-consciousness is thin, hard to define and, as the Terri Schiavo case taught us, often rife with ethical quandaries. A research team is developing a tool that will be able to quantify just how conscious a person is, which could prove to be quite useful for research and clinical practices. From the article: 'The metric relies on the idea that consciousness involves widespread communication between different areas of the brain, with each region performing specialized functions. Loss of consciousness during sleep or anaesthesia, or from brain injury, may be caused by the disengagement of brain regions from one another.'"
An article in the Atlantic earlier this year discussed a technology apparently widely employed by hospitals to monitor whether patients are experiencing "interoperative awareness" during surgery: a Bispectral Index (BIS) monitor, which performs a electroencephalogram continuously during surgery and checks it against patterns thought to indicate conscious awareness. In early testing, it looked like it could detect most cases of interoperative awareness and was quickly adopted in hospitals from around 2004, but its reliability is now in question and the device, though still widely used, is controversial.
From TFA, it seems this system is aimed at understanding brain damage and not at preventing interoperative awareness. Unfortunately the article doesn't give enough detail to know if the new tool is also based on EEG (I can't access the original study through the paywall). But, if it is, and if it gives a better sense of what patients are aware of, maybe it will have some use in the operating room as well.