ArticleScience translational medicine2024
Multimodal MRI reveals brainstem connections that sustain wakefulness in human consciousness.
Article in Science translational medicine, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Autonomic Network Signatures of Interictal Cardiorespiratory Dysfunction in Patients With Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.Neurology · 2026Article
- Supratentorial Brain Lesions in Unconscious Patients Map to a Common Human Brain Circuit.Annals of neurology · 2026Observational
- Multimodal Biomarkers of Consciousness in Acute Severe Traumatic Brain Injury.Journal of neurotrauma · 2026Article
- Probabilistic mapping and automated segmentation of human brainstem white matter bundles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A thalamic perspective of (un)consciousness in pharmacological and pathological states in humans.Brain communications · 2026Article
- Global White Matter Damage in Focal Brainstem Injury Patients With Disorders of Consciousness: A Diffusion Tensor Tractography Study.European journal of neurology · 2026Article
- The role of coupling among brain regions between the default mode network and the "Mesocircuit" Model in arousal in disorders of consciousness.Frontiers in neurology · 2026Article
- Early Detection of Covert Consciousness With Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.Annals of neurology · 2025Article
- High Resolution Postmortem MRI Discovers Developing Structural Connectivity in the Human Ascending Arousal Network.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Biological Markers of Brain Network Connectivity and Pain Sensitivity Distinguish Low Coping from High Coping Veterans with Persistent Post-Traumatic Headache.Journal of neurotrauma · 2025Observational
- Advances in understanding and treating disorders of consciousness caused by brainstem injury.Chinese neurosurgical journal · 2025Review
- Subcortical Hubs of Brain Networks Sustaining Human Consciousness.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Automated MRI Segmentation of Brainstem Nuclei Critical to Consciousness.Human brain mapping · 2025Observational
- A human brain network linked to restoration of consciousness after deep brain stimulation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Can Pure Thalamic Strokes Lead to Severe Impairment of Arousal?European journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Shared subcortical arousal systems across sensory modalities during transient modulation of attention.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Duration of resuscitation, regain of consciousness and histopathological severity of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy after cardiac arrest.Resuscitation plus · 2025Article
- Association of Bidirectional Network Cores in the Brain with Perceptual Awareness and Cognition.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Association of bidirectional network cores in the brain with perceptual awareness and cognition.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Multimodal state-dependent connectivity analysis of arousal and autonomic centers in the brainstem and basal forebrain.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
21 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Consciousness is composed of arousal (i.e., wakefulness) and awareness. Substantial progress has been made in mapping the cortical networks that underlie awareness in the human brain, but knowledge about the subcortical networks that sustain arousal in humans is incomplete. Here, we aimed to map the connectivity of a proposed subcortical arousal network that sustains wakefulness in the human brain, analogous to the cortical default mode network (DMN) that has been shown to contribute to awareness. We integrated data from ex vivo diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of three human brains, obtained at autopsy from neurologically normal individuals, with immunohistochemical staining of subcortical brain sections. We identified nodes of the proposed default ascending arousal network (dAAN) in the brainstem, hypothalamus, thalamus, and basal forebrain. Deterministic and probabilistic tractography analyses of the ex vivo diffusion MRI data revealed projection, association, and commissural pathways linking dAAN nodes with one another and with DMN nodes. Complementary analyses of in vivo 7-tesla resting-state functional MRI data from the Human Connectome Project identified the dopaminergic ventral tegmental area in the midbrain as a widely connected hub node at the nexus of the subcortical arousal and cortical awareness networks. Our network-based autopsy methods and connectivity data provide a putative neuroanatomic architecture for the integration of arousal and awareness in human consciousness.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.