Assessing Consciousness in Patients With Disorders of Consciousness Using a Musical Stimulation Paradigm and Verifiable Criteria

Numerous studies have shown that musical stimulation can activate corresponding functional brain areas. Electroencephalogram (EEG) activity during musical stimulation can be used to assess the consciousness states of patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). In this study, a musical stimulation paradigm and verifiable criteria were used for consciousness assessment. Twenty-nine participants (13 healthy subjects, 6 patients in a minimally conscious state (MCS) and 10 patients in a vegetative state (VS)) were recruited, and EEG signals were collected while participants listened to preferred and relaxing music. Fusion features based on differential entropy (DE), common spatial pattern (CSP), and EEG-based network pattern (ENP) features were extracted from EEG signals, and a convolutional neural network-long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM) model was employed to classify preferred and relaxing music.The results showed that the average classification accuracy for healthy subjects reached 85.58%. For two of the patients in the MCS group, the classification accuracies reached 78.18% and 66.14%, and they were diagnosed with emergence from MCS (EMCS) two months later. The accuracies of three patients in the VS group were 58.18%, 64.32% and 62.05%, with two patients showing slight increases in scale scores. Our study suggests that musical stimulation could be an effective method for consciousness detection, with significant diagnostic implications for patients with DOC.