Brain Scanners on Billboards to Read Your Thoughts and Advertise
People in intensive care can exist unable to say what treatment they desire
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When a person sustains a severe brain injury that leaves them unable to communicate, their families and doctors often have to make life-or-death decisions about their care for them. Now brain scanners are being tested in intensive care to see if mind-reading can enable some patients to have their say, New Scientist can reveal.
At the moment, doctors ask the families of people who have a poor prognosis and cannot communicate if they think their relative would want to continue life-sustaining treatments such as being on a ventilator. "Life would exist so much easier if you could just ask the person," says Adrian Owen at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
Owen'southward team previously adult a encephalon-scanning approach for a much smaller grouping of people – those in states betwixt consciousness and beingness in a blackout, for case those in a vegetative state. Such people testify few signs of awareness and accept to be fed through a tube.
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Owen found that some of these people can direct their thoughts in response to instructions, which tin be picked up on brain scans. If someone is asked to imagine playing tennis, for case, the office of their encephalon involved in movement lights upwardly in the scan.
Read more: Shocking show shows people in vegetative states may be conscious
This has allow his and other teams ask those who are able to respond in this mode yes/no questions, which tin give people a say over their living weather condition. Nearly a fifth of people the technique is tried on tin can answer.
Owen is at present using the same technique on people who are in intensive care in the offset few days after sustaining a severe brain injury. In such circumstances, just over a quarter of people stop upwards having their handling withdrawn due to a poor prognosis.
For instance, in some cases doctors may predict that if the person survives, they would be paralysed and unable to speak. "A decision will typically exist made in the first 10 days about whether to go on or pull the plug," says Owen.
His team has and then far used brain scanning on about 20 such people in intensive care to try to communicate with them. Owen won't yet reveal how many responded to questions, nor whether he asked them if they wanted to live or die.
Read more: Five ways engineering can read your listen – and what information technology's good for
Only he says he has also made progress in developing a new brain imaging technique. The original method uses fMRI machines. To use them the person has to be taken to a carve up room and put inside a scanner, and their tubes and equipment take to be changed to allow this to happen. "It'due south really challenging and unsafe," says Owen.
The new arroyo uses functional about-infrared spectroscopy, which can be done at the bedside and requires simply a headset. Although the method visualises merely a pocket-size part of the brain, this is plenty to permit someone answer a yes/no question by imagining playing lawn tennis to give the answer "yeah".
In a paper published concluding week, Owen's team showed this allowed volunteers without brain injury to accurately answer questions three-quarters of the fourth dimension (Frontiers in Neuroscience, doi.org/dncs). The team has besides used it successfully to speak to people with a status that causes complete paralysis (see "Temporarily locked in", beneath).
Besides equally carrying information virtually a person'southward wishes, bedside heed-reading may likewise be useful for shedding calorie-free on their prognosis. Among people in a vegetative state, those who tin can answer to instructions in a brain scanner are more likely to recover, says Owen.
Continued treatment
He believes the technique is more likely to atomic number 82 to ventilator treatment being continued than stopped. "Negative findings are hard to translate," he says. "Positive findings are easier."
"This is potentially exciting simply I wouldn't want people to get their hopes up because this might only exist applicable to a very minor group of people," says Paul Dean of the UK's Intensive Care Club.
If doctors are able to communicate with people in this style, they would accept to be confident the patient had the legal mental capacity to brand life or death decisions, says Jenny Kitzinger at Cardiff Academy, UK. "Have they understood the question, have they understood the diagnosis?"
Temporarily locked in
Brain-scanning techniques can as well aid people with temporary paralysis communicate. In Guillain-Barré syndrome, people may lose their power to motion and spend a few weeks immobile in intensive care, but they ordinarily recover.
Most people are sedated while they are "locked in", only a few enquire to remain conscious. In three cases, at their doctors' request, Adrian Owen at the University of Western Ontario in Canada has used brain scanning to talk with the person while they were paralysed, to bank check they wanted to remain unsedated.
"It takes v minutes to get absolute confidence in their response to each question," he says. "Simply there is no other mode to communicate with these patients."
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Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2235266-exclusive-brain-scans-used-to-read-minds-of-intensive-care-patients/
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