ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the added value of the neuroimaging modalities in the diagnostic and prognostic assessment of patients with Disorders of consciousness (DOC). The assessment of patients with DOC remains a big challenge. Advances in emergency medicine, intensive care, and reanimation have significantly increased the number of patients that survive traumatic accidents, prolonged cardiac arrest, and severe brain injures of different etiologies. The DOC include a wide spectrum of clinical conditions encompassing states of unawareness, from vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome to transient signs of consciousness and apparent unawareness, with full consciousness retained. Key advances in our understanding of DOC have come from the use of functional neuroimaging, which gave the possibility to objectively measure cognitive processing and complex functions, also in unresponsive patients. The computed tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance (MR) techniques, due to their high spatial and contrast resolution, are considered among the most informative modalities for structural imaging.
