Only 7% of people who enter into a prolonged vegetative state have good recoveries.
The odds of recovery drop to almost zero after a year of being vegetative.
Of the patients they looked at, 44 had been diagnosed by the staff as vegetative.
Researchers once assumed that the cortex, the information-processing hub of the brain, was always destroyed in vegetative patients.
Observational assessments of Mr Routley since he responded in the scanner have continued to suggest he is vegetative.
BBC: Vegetative patient Scott Routley says 'I'm not in pain'
Let's start with what vegetative and minimally conscious patients - where fragments of awareness remain - are not.
Finally, they gave the instructions to a patient who had been diagnosed as being vegetative two years earlier.
He had the clinical picture of a typical vegetative patient and showed no spontaneous movements that looked meaningful.
BBC: Vegetative patient Scott Routley says 'I'm not in pain'
It's very, very rare to be in a vegetative state for a long period of time and wake up.
Her parents rejected the doctors' diagnosis that Terri was in a persistent vegetative state, and insisted she could recover.
The BBC's Panorama programme followed several vegetative and minimally-conscious patients in Britain and Canada for more than a year.
BBC: Vegetative patient Scott Routley says 'I'm not in pain'
Since then, he has been in a vegetative state, connected to a respirator.
BBC: Ariel Sharon: Israeli ex-PM in coma 'has brain activity'
Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage.
She said the hospital did a study of 60 patients admitted with a diagnosis of vegetative state and 43% could communicate.
Vegetative patients who have recovered full cognitive abilities say that waking up is nothing like movies make it out to be.
They are using high-tech brain scans on vegetative and minimally conscious patients to try to understand why some recover and others don't.
Court-appointed doctors had said she was in a permanent vegetative state and would not recover, but her parents had said she could.
With vegetative patients the brain injury causes sufficient damage to leave them with nothing but core reflexes and no higher cognitive function.
"Some people in vegetative states respond on a metabolic level, but cannot respond in a way that people can see, " Shalef said.
This describes patients who are a shade better off than those in a vegetative state, because they show fluctuating signs of awareness.
India's Supreme Court has rejected a plea to end the life of a woman who has been in a vegetative state since 1973.
At the extreme end of the scale, the consequences of head injury are death, persistent vegetative state or severe physical and mental disablement.
She is unable to talk and had been thought to be in a vegetative state, with no awareness or consciousness of her surroundings.
Giacino is leading a federally funded five-year, 180-patient study of an antiviral and Parkinson's disease drug called amantadine in minimally conscious and vegetative patients.
Argentina's Dr. Fridman, for example, has tried levodopa on five minimally conscious and vegetative patients (including Gisela Ugalde), and four have made good recoveries.
India's Supreme Court has directed three doctors to examine the medical condition of a woman who has been in a vegetative state since 1973.
In a separate news article I have written about the extraordinary brain-scanning technique which is being used to help some vegetative patients to communicate.
Since 1993, a total of 43 patients in a persistent vegetative state, or PVS, have died after a judge ordered that treatment could be withdrawn.
British nursery school teacher Kate Bainbridge went into a near-vegetative state for four months starting in June 1997 after a virus caused severe brain inflammation.
In her petition, Pinki Virani said that Ms Shanbaug had been in a "persistent vegetative state" for 37 years and was "virtually a dead person".
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