Cerebellar TMS-EEG in a chronic stroke patient with connectional diaschisis of the dentato-thalamo-cortical tract.

This study aimed to assess the prognosis of patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) using auditory stimulation with electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings.We enrolled 72 patients with DoC in the study, which involved subjecting patients to auditory stimulation while EEG responses were recorded. Coma Recovery Scale–Revised (CRS-R) scores and Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) were determined for each patient and followed up for three months. A frequency spectrum analysis was performed on the EEG recordings. Finally, the power spectral density (PSD) index was used to predict the prognosis of patients with DoC based on a support vector machine (SVM) model.Power spectral analyses revealed that the cortical response to auditory stimulation showed a decreasing trend with decreasing consciousness levels. Auditory stimulation-induced changes in absolute PSD at the delta and theta bands were positively correlated with the CRS-R and GOS scores. Furthermore, these cortical responses to auditory stimulation had a good ability to discriminate between good and poor prognoses of patients with DoC.Auditory stimulation-induced changes in the PSD were highly predictive of DoC outcomes.Our findings showed that cortical responses to auditory stimulation may be an important electrophysiological indicator of prognosis in patients with DoC.