Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The moment when Prof Owen asked patient Scott whether he was in pain 
 
 A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain. The medical breakthrough, believed to be the only time a severely brain injured patient has been able to relay clinically relevant information to their doctors, is being touted as a new way to possibly improve their quality of care. It happened last June when doctors in London, Ont., used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) to analyze brain activity patterns in Scott Routley. Vegetative patients emerge from a coma into a condition where they have periods awake, with their eyes open, but have no perception of themselves or the outside world. His team has been working for the past year trying to determine whether Routley, who became vegetative following a car crash 12 years ago, had any "residual brain activity" and how much he was able to understand them. Owen, who is the head of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario, says research published online last year in The Lancet shows that one in five of these patients are conscious, but essentially trapped in their bodies because they're unable to communicate verbally or physically. But now, for the first time, doctors caring for the 39-year-old London, Ont., man say they know he's not in pain. "This was a landmark moment for us because for the first time, a patient can actually tell us information, important information about how they're feeling and their current situation," said lead researcher Dr. Adrian Owen on Tuesday. "We can now ask the patients about these things and give them a role in the decision making that governs their life." What time would they like to be fed... activities of daily living which are entirely under the control of these people around them, the people caring for them," he said. Prof Bryan Young at University Hospital, London - Mr Routley's neurologist for a decade - said the scan results overturned all the behavioural assessments that had been made over the years. FMRI SCANNING Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging measures the real-time activity of the brain by tracking the flow of oxygen-rich blood 
 
 The patients were repeatedly asked to imagine playing tennis or walking around their home 
 
 In healthy volunteers each produces a distinct pattern of activity, in the premotor cortex for the first task and the parahippocampal gyrus for the second 
 
 It allowed the researchers to put a series of yes or no questions to severely brain-injured patients. A minority were able to answer by using the power of thought 
 
 In 2010 Prof Owen published research showing that nearly one in five of the vegetative patients were able to communicate using brain activity 
 
 "I was impressed and amazed that he was able to show these cognitive responses.
– An intriguing medical breakthrough out of Canada—doctors say they have been able for the first time to communicate with a patient who has severe brain damage. Better yet, the message delivered by the patient was a great one: I'm not in pain. The Canadian Press and the BBC explain that doctors studied the patient's brain waves as they voiced a command: he should think about playing tennis if he were not in pain or about walking around the house if he were. The activities trigger different parts of the brain—motor skills vs. visual associations—and the man's brain waves suggested he was pain-free. "Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind," says a British neuroscientist, referring to 39-year-old Scott Routley. "We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is." Routley has been in a vegetative state since a car accident 12 years ago.