Kurz Eva-Maria, Wood Guilherme, Kober Silvia Erika, Schippinger Walter, Pichler Gerald, Müller-Putz Gernot, Bauernfeind Günther
Institute of Neural Engineering, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria; BioTechMed Graz, Graz, Austria; Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
BioTechMed Graz, Graz, Austria; Institute of Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
Brain Cogn. 2018 Aug;125:78-87. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2018.06.002. Epub 2018 Jun 14.
Recently, fNIRS has been proposed as a promising approach for awareness detection, and a possible method to establish basic communication in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC).
Using fNIRS, the present study evaluated the applicability of auditory presented mental-arithmetic tasks in this respect.
We investigated the applicability of active attention to serial subtractions for awareness detection in ten healthy controls (HC, 21-32 y/o), by comparing the measured patterns to patterns induced by self-performance of the same task. Furthermore, we examined the suitability of ignoring the given task as additional control signal to implement a two-class brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm. Finally, we compared our findings in HC with recordings in one DOC patient (78 y/o).
Results of the HC revealed no differences between the self-performance and the attention condition, making the attention task suitable for awareness detection. However, there was no general difference between the ignore and attend condition, making the tasks less suitable for BCI control. Despite inconsistent correlations between the patient data and the HC group, single runs of the patient recordings revealed task-synchronous patterns - however, we cannot conclude whether the measured activation derives from instruction based task performance and thus awareness.
最近，功能近红外光谱技术（fNIRS）已被提出作为一种用于意识检测的有前景的方法，以及一种在意识障碍（DOC）患者中建立基本交流的可能方法。
本研究使用fNIRS评估了听觉呈现的心算任务在这方面的适用性。
我们通过将测量模式与同一任务自我执行所诱导的模式进行比较，研究了主动注意连续减法在10名健康对照者（HC，21 - 32岁）中用于意识检测的适用性。此外，我们检查了将忽略给定任务作为额外控制信号以实现两类脑机接口（BCI）范式的适用性。最后，我们将在HC中的研究结果与一名DOC患者（78岁）的记录进行了比较。
HC的结果显示自我执行和注意条件之间没有差异，这使得注意任务适用于意识检测。然而，忽略和注意条件之间没有普遍差异，这使得这些任务不太适合用于BCI控制。尽管患者数据与HC组之间的相关性不一致，但患者记录的单次运行显示出任务同步模式——然而，我们无法得出所测量的激活是否源自基于指令的任务执行以及因此是否源自意识。
