Neurocritical care
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In order to successfully detect, classify, prognosticate, and develop targeted therapies for patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), it is crucial to improve our mechanistic understanding of how severe brain injuries result in these disorders. ⋯ In this white paper, we discuss research priorities that would enable us to begin to close these knowledge gaps. We propose that a fundamental step towards this goal will be to combine translational, multi-scale, and multimodal data, with new biomarkers, theory-driven approaches, and computational models, to produce an integrated account of neural mechanisms in DOC. Importantly, we envision that reciprocal interaction between domains will establish a "virtuous cycle," leading towards a critical vantage point of integrated knowledge that will enable the advancement of the scientific understanding of DOC and consequently, an improvement of clinical practice.