Research at Western hopes to reveal thoughts and intentions of people with brain injuries

Adrian Owen and Karnig Kazazian combine different neuroimaging methods to assess patients at the bedside in the first few days after their brain injury. (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications)

It’s the fabric of most people’s nightmares, being stuck inside your mind, with no way of communicating – awake, but unable to respond.

A new paper published in Lancet Neurology by Western University scientist Adrian Owen and colleagues hopes to unlock secrets of neuroimaging that could reveal the thoughts, actions, and intentions of people with brain injuries, based on the activity observed in their grey matter. Most importantly, this breakthrough hopes to more accurately predict the survival rate of ICU patients.

“Using technology developed at Western, we are now able to detect conscious awareness and even communicate with some patients who appear to be comatose in the ICU following a serious brain injury,” said Owen, professor of cognitive neuroscience and imaging.

The hope is that the team’s findings will help inform clinical care, diagnosis, prognosis, ethics, and medical-legal decision making after severe brain injury.

“We are making incredible progress,” said Karnig Kazazian, research associate in the Owen Lab and first author of the paper. “For the first time, we are able to predict who will survive and who is less likely to, and this has huge implications for how clinical resources are allocated.”

The team combines different neuroimaging methods, working to assess patients in the first few days following a traumatic brain injury.

“We talk to many families with loved ones who are existing on the border between life and death,” said Owen. “In almost every case, they express a strong preference for being informed about the outcomes of our neuroimaging assessments. They want to know that doctors, clinicians and scientists have tried everything, that everyone has gone the extra mile.”