Acute Pain Assessment Using Facial Expression Analysis
Acute Pain Assessment Using Facial Expression Analysis
Managing pain, which affects 20-50% of the population, is a major issue in daily clinical
 practice. Evaluation of pain intensity is essential to adapt treatment but as it mainly
 relies on self-report, this assessment is difficult or impossible in non-communicating
 patients. In these cases, pain can only be evaluated by medical staff by the observation of
 pain-related characteristics like facial expression of pain (FEP). However, recognition of
 FEP is subjective, time-consuming and subject to multiple biases frequently leading to
 underestimation of pain and consequently under-treatment. Some of these biases could be
 solved by the use of facial recognition technology, allowing objective, automated and
 time-saving pain assessment. DEF-I aims to address technical issues and achieve the
 development of facial expression recognition digital tool able to evaluate severe acute pain
 in clinical practice, with high validity and utility by improving the quality of the images
 to be analyzed, by studying larger samples of patients, data and images, in order to
 correlate more efficiently the pain intensity felt by a patient with the expression of his
 face. The main objective of this study is to verify whether it is possible to quantitatively
 correlate the intensity of acute postoperative pain felt by a patient with his facial
 expression. The secondary objective is to define a reliable computer algorithm that
 qualitatively correlates the type of acute postoperative pain experienced by a patient with
 his facial expression.
Inclusion Criteria:

 -  Any adult patient undergoing surgery in our institution during the study duration,

 -  able to express pain intensity on NRS

 Exclusion Criteria:

 -  patient to be operated on in the area of the face or eye

 -  Patient with altered facial morphology related to a dressing, suture, wound, trauma or
 oedema on the face

 -  patient not compliant or unable to clearly express pain