Functional brain imaging: Gatecrashing the clinical party?

摘要

In The Lancet, Johan Stender and colleagues1 report the use of two functional brain imaging techniques to improve diagnosis and prognostic accuracy in 126 patients with severe brain injury (8l in a minimally conscious state, 41 with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome [vegetative state], and four with locked-in syndrome). The investigators used standardised clinical assessments (Coma Recovery Scale-Revised [CSR-R]), cerebral 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET, and functional MRI (fMRI) during mental imagery tasks.