Automatically detecting pain in video through facial action units

In a clinical setting, pain is reported either through patient self-report or via an observer. Such measures are problematic as they are: 1) subjective, and 2) give no specific timing information. Coding pain as a series of facial action units (AUs) can avoid these issues as it can be used to gain an objective measure of pain on a frame-by-frame basis. Using video data from patients with shoulder injuries, in this paper, we describe an active appearance model (AAM)-based system that can automatically detect the frames in video in which a patient is in pain. This pain data set highlights the many challenges associated with spontaneous emotion detection, particularly that of expression and head movement due to the patient's reaction to pain. In this paper, we show that the AAM can deal with these movements and can achieve significant improvements in both the AU and pain detection performance compared to the current-state-of-the-art approaches which utilize similarity-normalized appearance features only.

Plantar fasciitis : are pain and fascial thickness associated with arch shape and loading?

Background and Purpose Although plantar fascial thickening is a sonographic criterion for the diagnosis of plantar fasciitis, the effect of local loading and structural factors on fascial morphology are unknown. The purposes of this study were to compare sonographic measures of fascial thickness and radiographic measures of arch shape and regional loading of the foot during gait in individuals with and without unilateral plantar fasciitis and to investigate potential relationships between these loading and structural factors and the morphology of the plantar fascia in individuals with and without heel pain. Subjects The participants were 10 subjects with unilateral plantar fasciitis and 10 matched asymptomatic controls. Methods Heel pain on weight bearing was measured by a visual analog scale. Fascial thickness and static arch angle were determined from bilateral sagittal sonograms and weight-bearing lateral foot roentgenograms. Regional plantar loading was estimated from a pressure plate. Results On average, the plantar fascia of the symptomatic limb was thicker than the plantar fascia of the asymptomatic limb (6.1±1.4 mm versus 4.2±0.5 mm), which, in turn, was thicker than the fascia of the matched control limbs (3.4±0.5 mm and 3.5±0.6 mm). Pain was correlated with fascial thickness, arch angle, and midfoot loading in the symptomatic foot. Fascial thickness, in turn, was positively correlated with arch angle in symptomatic and asymptomatic feet and with peak regional loading of the midfoot in the symptomatic limb. Discussion and Conclusion The findings indicate that fascial thickness and pain in plantar fasciitis are associated with the regional loading and static shape of the arch.

Social signal processing for pain monitoring using a hidden conditional random field

utomatic pain monitoring has the potential to greatly improve patient diagnosis and outcomes by providing a continuous objective measure. One of the most promising methods is to do this via automatically detecting facial expressions. However, current approaches have failed due to their inability to: 1) integrate the rigid and non-rigid head motion into a single feature representation, and 2) incorporate the salient temporal patterns into the classification stage. In this paper, we tackle the first problem by developing a “histogram of facial action units” representation using Active Appearance Model (AAM) face features, and then utilize a Hidden Conditional Random Field (HCRF) to overcome the second issue. We show that both of these methods improve the performance on the task of pain detection in sequence level compared to current state-of-the-art-methods on the UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain Archive.

Recognising facial expressions with noisy data

Techniques to improve the automated analysis of natural and spontaneous facial expressions have been developed. The outcome of the research has applications in several fields including national security (eg: expression invariant face recognition); education (eg: affect aware interfaces); mental and physical health (eg: depression and pain recognition).

An application of fractal image-set coding in facial recognition

Faces are complex patterns that often differ in only subtle ways. Face recognition algorithms have difficulty in coping with differences in lighting, cameras, pose, expression, etc. We propose a novel approach for facial recognition based on a new feature extraction method called fractal image-set encoding. This feature extraction method is a specialized fractal image coding technique that makes fractal codes more suitable for object and face recognition. A fractal code of a gray-scale image can be divided in two parts – geometrical parameters and luminance parameters. We show that fractal codes for an image are not unique and that we can change the set of fractal parameters without significant change in the quality of the reconstructed image. Fractal image-set coding keeps geometrical parameters the same for all images in the database. Differences between images are captured in the non-geometrical or luminance parameters – which are faster to compute. Results on a subset of the XM2VTS database are presented.

Exploring non-cancer pain conditions in a community sample : critiquing a current conceptual model of the acute to chronic pain transition and examining predictors of chronicity

This program of research examines the experience of chronic pain in a community sample. While, it is clear that like patient samples, chronic pain in non-patient samples is also associated with psychological distress and physical disability, the experience of pain across the total spectrum of pain conditions (including acute and episodic pain conditions) and during the early course of chronic pain is less clear. Information about these aspects of the pain experience is important because effective early intervention for chronic pain relies on identification of people who are likely to progress to chronicity post-injury. A conceptual model of the transition from acute to chronic pain was proposed by Gatchel (1991a). In brief, Gatchel’s model describes three stages that individuals who have a serious pain experience move through, each with worsening psychological dysfunction and physical disability. The aims of this program of research were to describe the experience of pain in a community sample in order to obtain pain-specific data on the problem of pain in Queensland, and to explore the usefulness of Gatchel’s Model in a non-clinical sample. Additionally, five risk factors and six protective factors were proposed as possible extensions to Gatchel’s Model. To address these aims, a prospective longitudinal mixed-method research design was used. Quantitative data was collected in Phase 1 via a comprehensive postal questionnaire. Phase 2 consisted of a follow-up questionnaire 3 months post-baseline. Phase 3 consisted of semi-structured interviews with a subset of the original sample 12 months post follow-up, which used qualitative data to provide a further in-depth examination of the experience and process of chronic pain from respondents’ point of view. The results indicate chronic pain is associated with high levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. However, the levels of disability reported by this Queensland sample were generally lower than those reported by clinical samples and consistent with disability data reported in a New South Wales population-based study. With regard to the second aim of this program of research, while some elements of the pain experience of this sample were consistent with that described by Gatchel’s Model, overall the model was not a good fit with the experience of this non-clinical sample. The findings indicate that passive coping strategies (minimising activity), catastrophising, self efficacy, optimism, social support, active strategies (use of distraction) and the belief that emotions affect pain may be important to consider in understanding the processes that underlie the transition to and continuation of chronic pain.

Prevalence and correlates of low back pain among occupational therapy students in Northern Queensland

Background: Although low back pain (LBP) is an important issue for the health profession, few studies have examined LBP among occupational therapy students. Purpose. To investigate the prevalence and distribution of LBP, its adverse sequelae; and to identify potential risk factors.----------- Methods: In 2005, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to occupational therapy students in Northern Queensland.----------- Findings: The 12-month period-prevalence of LBP was 64.6%. Nearly half (46.9%) had experienced pain for over 2 days, 38.8% suffered LBP that affected their daily lives, and 24.5% had sought medical treatment. The prevalence of LBP ranged from 45.5 to 77.1% (p=0.004), while the prevalence of LBP symptoms persisting longer than two days was 34.1 to 62.5% (p=0.020). Logistic regression analysis indicated that year of study and weekly computer usage were statistically-significant LBP risk factors.----------- Implications: The occupational therapy profession will need to further investigate the high prevalence of student LBP identified in this study.

CPR training in households of patients with chest pain

The objectives of this study are to (1) quantify prior cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training in households of patients presenting to the Emergency Department (ED) with or without chest pain or ischaemic heart disease (IHD); (2) evaluate the willingness of household members to undertake CPR training; and (3) identify potential barriers to the learning and provision of bystander CPR. A cross-sectional study was conducted by surveying patients presenting to the ED of a metropolitan teaching hospital over a 6-month period. Two in five households of patients presenting with chest pain or IHD had prior training in CPR. This was no higher than for households of patients presenting without chest pain or IHD. Just under two in three households of patients presenting with chest pain or IHD were willing to participate in future CPR classes. Potential barriers to learning CPR included lack of information on CPR classes, perceived lack of intellectual and/or physical capability to learn CPR and concern about causing anxiety in the person at risk of cardiac arrest. Potential barriers to CPR provision included an unknown cardiac arrest victim and fear of infection. The ED provides an opportunity for increasing family and community capacity for bystander intervention through referral to appropriate training.

The impact of pain on the quality of life of people with multiple sclerosis: A community survey

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of pain on functioning across multiple quality of life (QOL) domains among individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS). A total of 219 people were recruited from a regional MS society membership database to serve as the community-based study sample. All participants completed a questionnaire containing items about their demographic and clinical characteristics, validated measures of QOL and MS-related disability, and a question on whether or not they had experienced clinically significant pain in the preceding 2 weeks. Respondents who reported pain then completed an in-person structured pain interview assessing pain characteristics (intensity, quality, location, extent, and duration). Comparisons between participants with and without MS-related pain demonstrated that pain prevalence and intensity were strongly correlated with QOL: physical health, psychological health, level of independence, and global QOL were more likely to be impaired among people with MS when pain was present, and the extent of impairment was associated with the intensity of pain. Moreover, these relationships remained significant even after statistically controlling for multiple demographic and clinical covariates associated with self-reported QOL. These findings suggest that for people with MS, pain is an important source of distress and disability beyond that caused by neurologic impairments.

Selecting, optimizing and fusing ‘salient’ Gabor features for facial expression recognition

This paper describes a novel framework for facial expression recognition from still images by selecting, optimizing and fusing ‘salient’ Gabor feature layers to recognize six universal facial expressions using the K nearest neighbor classifier. The recognition comparisons with all layer approach using JAFFE and Cohn-Kanade (CK) databases confirm that using ‘salient’ Gabor feature layers with optimized sizes can achieve better recognition performance and dramatically reduce computational time. Moreover, comparisons with the state of the art performances demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

The efficacy of an augmented virtual reality system to alleviate pain in children undergoing burns dressing changes : a randomised controlled trial

In children, the pain and anxiety associated with acute burn dressing changes can be severe, with drug treatment alone frequently proving to be inadequate. Virtual reality (VR) systems have been successfully trialled in limited numbers of adult and paediatric burn patients. Augmented reality (AR) differs from VR in that it overlays virtual images onto the physical world, instead of creating a complete virtual world. This prospective randomised controlled trial investigated the use of AR as an adjunct to analgesia and sedation in children with acute burns. Forty-two children (30 male and 12 female), with an age range of 3–14 years (median age 9 years) and a total burn surface area ranging from 1 to 16% were randomised into a treatment (AR) arm and a control (basic cognitive therapy) arm after administration of analgesia and/or sedation. Pain scores, pulse rates (PR), respiratory rates (RR) and oxygen saturations (SaO2) were recorded pre-procedurally, at 10 min intervals and post-procedurally. Parents were also asked to grade their child's overall pain score for the dressing change. Mean pain scores were significantly lower (p = 0.0060) in the AR group compared to the control group, as were parental pain assessment scores (p = 0.015). Respiratory and pulse rates showed significant changes over time within groups, however, these were not significantly different between the two study groups. Oxygen saturation did not differ significantly over time or between the two study groups. This trial shows that augmented reality is a useful adjunct to pharmacological analgesia.