Quantifying and Characterizing Tonic Thermal Pain Across Subjects From EEG Data Using Random Forest Models.

OBJECTIVE: Effective pain assessment and management strategies are needed to better manage pain. In addition to self-report, an objective pain assessment system can provide a more complete picture of the neurophysiological basis for pain. In this study, a robust and accurate machine learning approach is developed to quantify tonic thermal pain across healthy subjects into a maximum of ten distinct classes.

METHODS: A random forest model was trained to predict pain scores using time-frequency wavelet representations of independent components obtained from electroencephalography (EEG) data, and the relative importance of each frequency band to pain quantification is assessed.

RESULTS: The mean classification accuracy for predicting pain on an independent test subject for a range of 1-10 is 89.45%, highest among existing state of the art quantification algorithms for EEG. The gamma band is the most important to both intersubject and intrasubject classification accuracy.

CONCLUSION: The robustness and generalizability of the classifier are demonstrated.

SIGNIFICANCE: Our results demonstrate the potential of this tool to be used clinically to help us to improve chronic pain treatment and establish spectral biomarkers for future pain-related studies using EEG.