Project Overview

When a person suffers a severe brain injury, whether from an accident, stroke, or infection, clinicians struggle to predict if they will recover. During this time, families have many questions, such as: is my loved-one in there at all? Will they be themselves again at some point? Currently, our healthcare system has few answers for them, despite families having to make decisions about potentially withdrawing life-sustaining measures.

Our work aims to use how the brain responds to a complex stimulus, such as a movie, to better predict patient recovery. While movies might seem like odd stimuli to use in clinical contexts, they can be an excellent window into how the brain is functioning. When we listen to a movie, we have to follow the plot, understand the language, and feel emotions. All these aspects of our mental life are essential for everyday functioning and meaning. If the brain regions that support these processes were active in a patient, even in basic forms, it would suggest they are trending toward recovery. Importantly, it is easy to administer in an already resource-limited clinical setting while also being an easy task for patients.

To measure patients’ brain activity, we will use a technique called fNIRS. It is great in clinical settings because it’s portable, cheap, and can be safely applied directly at the bedside in intensive care units. Patients in our study will listen to two previously validated movie clips and we will measure how well their brain matches what we expect from a healthy brain. We predict that the more a patient’s brain responds like a healthy person, the more likely they are to have a good recovery. By doing this, we hope to give doctors critical and time-sensitive information that allows them to better understand the chances of recovery and make even better decisions regarding patient care. Overall, we hope this tool can also help make healthcare, particularly critical care, less uncertain and more efficient.

Principal Investigator

Matthew Kolisnyk , University of Western Ontario

Partners and Donors

Donation from Richard Sloan earmarked for TBI research