Emi Fló

Survey towards a Latin-American Society for Scientific Studies of Consciousness This survey explores the community's interest in a dedicated Society for the Scientific Studies of Consciousness in Latin America (LA). The focus of this society may be, among others, to develop regio...

[🚨LATAM ALERT🚨]
Do you want to strengthen consciousness science in Latin America? 🧠🌎

Take this short survey (5-10 mins) and join us in the creation of the first Latin American Society for Consciousness Science.

Your voice matters: forms.gle/iEd91YWVXcwH...

#Consciousnes #Science #LATAM

Integrative Electrophysiology and Neuroimaging Approach in Assessing Disorders of Consciousness: A Multimodal Multicentric Machine Learning Study Severely brain-injured patients may enter a spectrum of conditions collectively known as disorders of consciousness (DoC). This spectrum includes clinical categories such as unresponsive wakefulness s...

1/ Excited to share a part of my PhD in our new preprint:

Integrative Electrophysiology and Neuroimaging Approach in Assessing Disorders of Consciousness: A Multimodal Multicentric Machine Learning Study

#DoC #MachineLearning #Multimodal

medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

A 🧵...

11/ Huge thanks to our collaborators, participants, patients, and caregivers! Your contributions made this work possible. 🙌. #ERANET_PerMed

10/ 🌟 Takeaway:
Our findings highlight the role of attention in shaping sensory processing. They expand the use of heart–brain interactions for diagnostics in DoC with an active task that provides multiple layers to explore information processing!

9/ 💡 Key finding #5:
When tested on five brain-injured patients, we found attention-driven changes in cortical responses to heartbeats and brain dynamics in a patient in UWS/VS and in a locked-in syndrome patient, suggesting that patients were engaging with the task! #Consciousness beyond behavior!

8/ 💡 Key finding #4:
We developed subject-specific classifiers using brain dynamical markers (e.g., complexity, mutual information, power). Power features stood out, perfectly classifying attentional focus in all participants.

7/ 💡 Key finding #3:
Heart-focused and sound-focused attention resulted in distinct brain dynamics. We saw differences in PSD slope, complexity, frontal connectivity, and theta oscillations.

6/ 💡 Key finding #2:
Attending to sounds enhanced auditory processing. This was evident not just in responses to target sounds but also to hidden noise repetitions, demonstrating attention's broad impact on sensory encoding.

5/ 💡 Key finding #1:
Focusing on heartbeats modulated heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs). These features distinguished between heart-focused and sound-focused attention in 17/20 participants—a robust marker!

4/ To test this, we designed a task engaging interoceptive (heart) and exteroceptive (sound) attention. We measured brain, heart, and breathing activity, while participants were exposed to salient auditory stimuli and hidden noise repetitions! 🤫

3/ 🎯 Our goal: Develop a tool to infer attention from brain responses to internal (heartbeats) and external (sounds) stimuli—a potential proxy for "command-following" in DoC patients, usable at the bedside!

2/ Why does this matter? 🧠 Diagnosing DoC often relies on behavior, which is prone to error, particularly for patients who can't produce overt responses. This is where brain and bodily responses can come in handy to complement diagnosis!

Predicting attentional focus: Heartbeat-evoked responses and brain dynamics during interoceptive and exteroceptive processing Abstract. Attention shapes our consciousness content and perception by increasing the probability of becoming aware and/or better encoding a selection of t

1/ 🎉 Thrilled to share part of my PhD work published in @PNAS_Nexus! 🌍 This collaboration spanned France, Italy, and Uruguay. We explored how brain-heart interactions reveal attentional focus—insights relevant to patients with #DisordersOfConsciousness (DoC).
🔗 academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...