Functional near-infrared spectroscopy: A novel tool for detecting consciousness after acute severe brain injury
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent advancements in functional neuroimaging have demonstrated that some unresponsive patients in the intensive care unit retain a level of consciousness that is inconsistent with their behavioral diagnosis of awareness. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a portable optical neuroimaging method that can be used to measure neural activity with good temporal and spatial resolution. However, the reliability of fNIRS for detecting the neural correlates of consciousness remains to be established. In a series of studies, we evaluated whether fNIRS can record sensory, perceptual, and command-driven neural processing in healthy participants and in behaviorally nonresponsive patients. At the individual healthy subject level, we demonstrate that fNIRS can detect commonly studied resting state networks, sensorimotor processing, speech-specific auditory processing, and volitional command-driven brain activity to a motor imagery task. We then tested fNIRS with three acutely brain injured patients and found that one could willfully modulate their brain activity when instructed to imagine playing a game of tennis-providing evidence of preserved consciousness despite no observable behavioral signs of awareness. The successful application of fNIRS for detecting preserved awareness among behaviorally nonresponsive patients highlights its potential as a valuable tool for uncovering hidden cognitive states in critical care settings.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it