Measuring the degree of pain kids are going through can be tricky, but a new method using facial pattern recognition software was recently developed at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
Currently, children and adolescents self-report their pain, usually on a scale of zero to 10, but the research team says most kids have trouble assessing their pain and young tots do not have the cognitive and conceptual abilities to belay their pain in such a way.
In such cases, members of the nursing staff are called to perform clinical pain assessments yet even with help from parents, they often underestimate the pain, says senior author Jeannie Huang, MD, MPH, a professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics and a gastroenterologist at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego.
What's more, these pain assessment sessions are often scheduled at the convenience of the hospital staff, which may not coincide with the height of the kids' pain, says Dr. Huang.
The software employs the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which was developed in Sweden to connect feelings with the facial expressions they produce and contains 46 anatomically-based component movements.
Using the software to analyse the sort of facial expressions we have when we experience pain, the research team assessed 50 children and adolescents ranging in age from five to 18 years old.
All participants were patients at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, where they had undergone laparoscopic appendectomies.
They filmed the kids at three separate intervals after their surgeries, the first being one day later, the next being one calendar day after the first post-op visit and once more at a follow-up within the first two to four weeks post-op.
The video recordings taken using the software were compared against self-reported pain ratings by the kids and also against pain ratings by their parents and nurses.
"The software demonstrated good-to-excellent accuracy in assessing pain conditions," says Dr. Huang. "Overall, this technology performed equivalent to parents and better than nurses. It also showed strong correlations with patient self-reported pain ratings."
What's more, Dr. Huang and her team detected no inconsistencies in the results concerning ethnicity, race, gender or age amongst the patients.
"Accurate assessment of pain is a fundamental tenet of delivery of care," says Dr. Huang.
Pain control is not only a question of comfort, according to Dr. Huang, it aids recovery, for previous research has indicated that if left untreated, pain could lead to unfavorable surgical outcomes.
A paper on the software was published in the journal Pediatrics. — AFP Relaxnews
