Figure 4.

Individual global cerebral glucose metabolism using the FDG-PET measurement (metabolic index) in a patient following traumatic brain injury (TBI) with UWS, minimal conscious state (MCS), emergence from MCS, and health control. (A) Hypometabolism is the most prominent in patients with UWS (Stender et al., 2016). (B) Global brain glucose metabolism distribution of quantified cortical metabolic values for all individual subjects in the pooled cohort (Stender et al., 2016). (C) (Left) Between-group differences in positive and negative default-mode networks (DMNs) and brain metabolism. Positive DMN connectivity (within network correlations) was decreased, albeit preserved, in all patient groups, from vegetative state/unresponsive wakeful syndrome (VS/UWS), MCS, and emergence from MCS (EMCS) (Stender et al., 2016); no differences were identified between the groups of patients (middle). By contrast, patients differed in negative DMN connectivity (between network anticorrelations), and negative DMN connectivity only observed in patients who emerged from MCS and healthy controls (Stender et al., 2016) (right). Brain metabolism was more preserved in patients who had emerged from MCS than in patients with VS/UWS or MCS (Silva et al., 2010). *p < 0.05, **p = 0.01, ***p < 0.001, ****p < 0.0001.