Determining levels of consciousness in people who have severe brain injury is notoriously hard. That task may become a little easier with the finding that brain scans can help doctors identify whether patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious state are likely to recover to some degree.  At present, most hospitals use bedside clinical observations – such as shining light into the eye and a battery of other tests – to determine someone’s level of consciousness. However, experience shows these diagnoses to be wrong around 40 per cent of the time. {read more here}