Can AI Improve Consciousness Disorders Diagnosis?

Consciousness is potentially the final frontier of knowledge about the human brain. For over a century, scientists from different disciplines—neuroscientists, physicists and, recently, experts in artificial intelligence—have been trying to unlock the brain’s innermost secrets. Curiously, psychopathology, which could have contributed greatly to this objective, has remained on the sidelines of this debate. Yet, many psychopathological disorders are naturally related to consciousness: from quantitative to qualitative disorders, from dereistic experiences to dissociative disorders and more. Despite the formidable development of innovative methods for understanding the brain, the more we know about its functions, the more complex the explanations appear. Its organization seems to be vastly more intricate than we thought until a few decades ago. The aim of this work is to show the complex, multi-layered processes underlying disorders of consciousness, the challenges posed by their identification and diagnosis, and how recent unimaginable innovations in AI technologies used in prediction and simulation tasks can provide novel insights into crucial areas of inquiry such as the birth and emergence of the Self and the disturbances of its fundamental structures.