David Fischer, MD Profile picture
Consciousness doctor, neurointensivist and director of the @RECOVER_program, dedicated to consciousness recovery after brain injury @PennMedicine.
Mar 5 8 tweets 4 min read
Illustrating the landscape of neuroprognostication is tough -- it's a complex and rapidly evolving literature of a complex topic. Here are a few key points from
/1 jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…
Coma has long been studied relative to specific etiologies of brain injury (e.g., anoxia, TBI, stroke). However, we can also consider coma as a final common pathway across etiologies, and there are fundamental principles of neuroprognostication that generalize across them. /2 Image
Apr 11, 2022 25 tweets 16 min read
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I wanted to share a formative rabbit hole I went down prior to joining #NeuroTwitter. It was a project with one goal: to use neuroimaging to understand human consciousness. What ensued was fascinating. A 🧵, and you can read it in @GreenJournal here: bit.ly/3DV955X 2/
At the start, we wanted to identify the brainstem region crucial to consciousness, by studying naturally occurring human brain lesions that cause coma. @josef_parvizi previously did this in a seminal study, finding that such lesions tend to occur in the tegmentum of the pons.
Mar 8, 2021 10 tweets 13 min read
Was #TheDarkKnight's Two-Face the product of brain injury? Harvey Dent was hospitalized after surviving the explosion and disfiguring burns that transformed him into the psychopathic villain, Two-Face. The background offers insight into the villain's psychological origins. (1/6) A monitor shows a computed tomography (CT) scan of Dent's head, which reveals contusions (blood) in both frontal lobes of the brain. Such contusions are common after traumatic brain injury, resulting from the brain striking the front of the skull during sudden deceleration. (2/6)