Distinguish Patients in a Vegetative State from the Minimally Conscious state: moral and legal dilemmas.

Research done in using current neuroimaging techniques - specifically, positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (functional MRI) - have provided evidence that vegetative patients may have fragments of consciousness. These findings make all the more urgent familiar moral and legal dilemmas arising in connection with persons in these reduced states, because in debating wheter these persons have a will, we have to take into account the possibility that they may have "glimpses of consciousness".