Assessing consciousness in patients with locked-in syndrome using their EEG
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research indicates that locked-in syndrome (LIS) patients retain both consciousness and cognitive functions, despite their inability to perform voluntary muscle movements or communicate. Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) provide a means for these patients to communicate, which is crucial, as the ability to interact with their environment has been shown to significantly enhance their wellbeing and quality of life. This paper presents an innovative approach to analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) data from four LIS patients to assess their consciousness levels, referred to as normalized consciousness levels (NCL) in this study. It consists of extracting different features based on frequency, complexity, and connectivity measures to maximize the probability of correctly determining the patients' actual states given the inexistence of ground truth. The consciousness levels derived from this approach aim to improve our understanding of the patients' condition, which is vital in order to build effective communication systems. Despite considerable inter-patient variability, the findings indicate that the approach is effective in detecting neural markers of consciousness and in differentiating between states across the majority of patients. By accurately assessing consciousness, this research aims to improve diagnosis in addition to determining the optimal time to initiate communication with these non-communicative patients. It is important to note that consciousness is a complex and difficult concept to define. In this study, the term "consciousness level" does not refer to a medical definition. Instead, it represents a scale of NCL values ranging from 0 to 1 representing the likelihood of the patient being fully conscious (1) or not (0).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".