When a person sustains a severe brain injury that leaves them unable to communicate, their families and doctors often have to make life-or-death decisions about their care for them.
当一个人遭受了严重的脑损伤，使他们无法交流时，他们的家人和医生经常不得不对他们的护理做出生死攸关的决定。
Now brain scanners are being tested in intensive care to see if mind-reading can enable some patients to have their say, New Scientist can reveal.
“新科学家”透露，现在大脑扫描仪正在重症监护中进行测试，看看读心术是否能让一些患者有发言权。
At the moment, doctors ask the families of people who have a poor prognosis and cannot communicate if they think their relative would want to continue life-sustaining treatments such as being on a ventilator.
目前，医生询问患者的家属，如果他们认为他们的亲属愿意继续使用呼吸机等维持生命的治疗，他们的预后很差，无法沟通。
“Life would be so much easier if you could just ask the person,” says Adrian Owen at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
加拿大西安大略大学的Adrian Owen说：“如果你可以直接问这个人，生活会容易得多。”
Owen’s team previously developed a brain-scanning approach for a much smaller group of people – those in states between consciousness and being in a coma, for example those in a vegetative state.
欧文的团队先前开发了一种大脑扫描方法，用于一小部分人-那些处于意识和昏迷状态之间的人，例如那些处于植物人状态的人。
Such people show few signs of awareness and have to be fed through a tube.
这样的人几乎没有意识到的迹象，必须通过管子喂食。
Owen found that some of these people can direct their thoughts in response to instructions, which can be picked up on brain scans.
欧文发现，这些人中的一些人可以将他们的思想引导到对指令的回应中，这可以通过脑部扫描来获取。
If someone is asked to imagine playing tennis, for instance, the part of their brain involved in movement lights up in the scan.
例如，如果有人被要求想象打网球，他们大脑中与运动有关的部分会在扫描中亮起。
This has let his and other teams ask those who are able to respond in this way yes/no questions, which can give people a say over their living conditions.
这让他和其他团队可以问那些能够以这种方式回答是/不是问题的人，这可以让人们对自己的生活条件有发言权。
About a fifth of people the technique is tried on can respond.
在尝试这项技术的人中，大约五分之一的人可以做出反应。
Owen is now using the same technique on people who are in intensive care in the first few days after sustaining a severe brain injury.
欧文现在正将同样的技术用于那些在遭受严重脑损伤后的头几天内处于重症监护中的人。
In such circumstances, just over a quarter of people end up having their treatment withdrawn due to a poor prognosis.
在这种情况下，刚刚超过四分之一的人最终由于预后不良而撤回了他们的治疗。
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