Antonino Naro and Rocco Salvatore Calabro
The diagnosis and awareness assessments in chronic disorders of consciousness (DOC) are biased, owing to their reliance on clinical behavioral measures. Indeed, objective tools should be employed with the goal of more precise awareness detection in these patients. To this end, brain stimulation techniques have been developed to demonstrate residual cortical-thalamocortical connectivity patterns sustaining fragment of awareness. This short commentary aims at illustrating the Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS) techniques applied to DOC patients. NIBS are promising in helping clinicians to differentiate among DOC patients and to identify residual fragments of awareness within Vegetative State individuals, namely Functional Locked-In Syndrome.
