Objective measure of pain during surgery using fNIRS
Key Researchers: David Borsook, Boston Children’s Hospital; David Boas, BU; Lino Becerra; Ke Peng; Meryem Ayşe Yücel, BU; Alexander von Lühmann, BU;
Summary: Assessing pain in individuals not able to communicate (e.g. infants, under surgery, or following stroke) is difficult due to the lack of non-verbal objective measures of pain. Near Infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) being a portable, non-invasive and inexpensive method of monitoring cerebral hemodynamic activity has the potential to provide such a measure. In this context, we aimed to identify objective markers of pain. Using fNIRS on healthy subjects, we were able to differentiate painful stimuli from a nonpainful stimuli based on their signal size and profile. We observed similar pain-related brain responses during catheter ablation of arrhythmias under general anesthesia and during routine screening colonoscopy. Our most recent data (unpublished) reveals that the brain response shows significant difference under morphine as compared to placebo. Overall, our results support the notion that fNIRS has utility as an objective measure of pain in the operating room.
Publications:
Funding: NIH R01 – GM104986