Consciousness Mapping: a personalized approach for diagnosis and treatement in brain-injured patients
A collaboration between Paris Brain Institute and Columbia University
Project Lead: Jacobo Sitt, M.D., PhD
(Paris Brain Institute)
Project co-Lead: Jan Claassen, M.D. (Columbia University)
Duration: 4 years
Budget : $1,1M
Severe brain injuries can occur at any stage of life. They can be caused by external events like a motor vehicle accident, sports activity, or internal events like a stroke or heart attack. Thanks to improved treatment, the rate of patients who survive after suffering severe brain injuries is increasing. While some of these patients regain full consciousness after a transient state of coma, others may develop more complex and lasting disorders of consciousness and may be behaviorally unresponsive even though they open their eyes or show very minimal, hard to detect signs of consciousness.
The importance of accuracy in such a diagnosis cannot be overstated: it guides treatment allocation and could make the difference between an end-of-life decision or a sustained intensive care.
Read more
Current diagnosis, based on bedside examination alone, is very challenging because the conventional behaviorally based signs of consciousness in a patient are often hard to detect and inconsistent, due to the many deficits associated with disorders of consciousness. For patients, families, and caregivers alike, there is a critical need to develop more precise, personalized diagnostic and prognostic tools.
Paris Brain Institute and the Disorders of Consciousness Lab at Columbia University are combining their expertise to address this challenge. Both institutions are world leaders in the field of consciousness disorders.
- The Physiological Investigations Of Clinically Normal And Impaired Cognition (PICNIC) team at Paris Brain Institute is composed of clinical staff and neuroscience researchers. The team has published groundbreaking studies on the large-scale screening of consciousness in brain-injured patients and has translated these findings into clinical decision-making tools.
- The Disorders of Consciousness Lab (DoC-Lab) of Columbia University is a US leader in the care of critically ill neurological patients and a global leader in the exploration of cognitive-motor dissociation, a state in which clinically unresponsive patients can show brain responses to verbal commands, suggesting covert consciousness.
This joint project will collect data at two clinical sites – in France and in the United States – using both new and established techniques in physiology, electrophysiology and neuroimaging. Based on these observations, Paris Brain Institute and Columbia University will use state-of the art machine learning to develop a multimodal personalized diagnostic tool for patients with disorders of consciousness.
This much-needed new tool will not only improve the diagnosis and prognosis of patients, enabling the development of more personalized therapeutic strategies; it will also provide significant relief for patients’ caregivers, families and loved ones.