Finding consciousness through EEG I've read an article about the consciousness in vegetative patients. Adrian Owen is one of the neuroscientist making research on this field. The article published on "Le scienze" was about the usage of fMRI before and EEG later, to check the presence of a consciousness.

Do you know of similar group of research in Italy? 
Is their work consolidated enough to be applied in the clinical practice by another neurologist?
I don't know any such group in Italy but there is a group in Liege, Belgium which is called Coma Science Group. It consists of scientists of various disciplines and their main interest is understanding disorders of consciousness. Also their work has a clinical orientation as well. From your description, I think it will be interesting to you. Their website is http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be