AI Spots Hidden Signs of Consciousness in Comatose Patients before Doctors Do

"Imagine lying in a hospital bed, awake but unable to move your body to communicate with the people around you. This experience of covert consciousness is a reality for many people who have sustained traumatic brain injuries. In a new study published in Communications Medicine, researchers found that they could detect signs of consciousness in comatose patients by using artificial intelligence to analyze facial movements that were too small to be noticed by clinicians."

"Covert consciousness was first detected in 2006, when researchers asked an unresponsive woman and healthy volunteers to imagine doing specific tasks while in a brain scanner. The team found that the woman showed brain activity in the same regions as the volunteers. Just last year researchers using similar brain imaging methods found that one in four behaviorally unresponsive patients was covertly conscious."

"Such tests aren't routinely performed on people in an unresponsive state because this type of neuroimaging is time-consuming and its operation requires specialized skills. Instead, doctors typically rely on more subjective visual examinations to gauge a person's level of consciousness, testing whether they open their eyes, respond to commands or startle at a loud noise. We were trying to find a way to quantify how conscious these patients are using simple and readily available technology,"

Covert consciousness can occur when a person is awake but behaviorally unresponsive after a traumatic brain injury. Brain-imaging tests have previously revealed covert consciousness by detecting task-related brain activity in unresponsive individuals, but such imaging is time-consuming and requires specialized skills. Clinical assessments usually rely on visual bedside exams, which can miss subtle signs. Artificial intelligence can analyze high-resolution video of facial micro-movements, down to individual pores, to quantify signs of consciousness that are too small for clinicians to detect. Video-based AI detection offers a simpler, more readily available approach to identify covert consciousness in comatose patients.

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