Fig. 2: Cortical evoked potentials exhibit distinctive features in patients with thalamic injury.

a The evoked responses to ACC stimulation in a recovering comatose patient with no thalamic injury and a patient with a bilateral thalamic injury who never recovered consciousness are overlaid in blue and red, respectively. b Propagation of these evoked responses across scalp and depth channels are shown. c A representative scalp evoked response to ACC stimulation in each sTBI patient is shown. d Evoked responses across patients were classified based on their complexity using zero-crossing (left panel) and LZ complexity (right panel). Each circle represents the average of evoked recordings across trials (90−100 trials per patient) from each scalp contact. Horizontal lines represent the average across all scalp contacts. Evoked responses from patients with thalamic injury exhibited significantly diminished complexity with both measures (n = 3564 trials recorded from 18 scalp contacts in patients with thalamic injury and 5220 trials for patients without thalamic injury, P < 0.001, two-tailed t-Test). In this figure, “fast recovery” and “delayed recovery” refer to Subjects 2 and 3, who followed commands at 38 and 51 days, respectively.