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Feeling pain? The computer can tell
Source: Agencies |
September 14, 2011, Wednesday
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Online Edition
Online Edition
CAN a computer tell when it hurts? It can if you train it, US researchers said yesterday.
A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain.
"The question we were trying to answer was can we use neuroimaging to objectively detect whether a person is in a state of pain or not. The answer was yes," said Dr. Sean Mackey of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One.
Currently, doctors rely on patients to tell them whether or not they are in pain. And that is still the gold standard for assessing pain, Mackey said.
But some patients -- the very young, the very old, dementia patients or those who are not conscious -- cannot say if they are hurting, and that has led to a long search for some way to objectively measure pain.
"People have been looking for a pain detector for a very long time," Mackey said.
A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain.
"The question we were trying to answer was can we use neuroimaging to objectively detect whether a person is in a state of pain or not. The answer was yes," said Dr. Sean Mackey of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One.
Currently, doctors rely on patients to tell them whether or not they are in pain. And that is still the gold standard for assessing pain, Mackey said.
But some patients -- the very young, the very old, dementia patients or those who are not conscious -- cannot say if they are hurting, and that has led to a long search for some way to objectively measure pain.
"People have been looking for a pain detector for a very long time," Mackey said.
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