Feeling pain? The computer can tell

Wed, 09/14/2011 - 7:04am


"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," Dr. Sean Mackey of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One.


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.


For the study, Mackey's team used a linear support vector machine -- a computer algorithm invented in 1995 -- to classify patterns of brain activity and determine whether or not someone is experiencing pain.






(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)



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