Automated Assessment of Pain Intensity Based on EEG Signal Analysis

Objective characterization of pain intensity is necessary under certain clinical conditions. The portable electroencephalogram (EEG) is a cost-effective assessment tool and lately, new methods using efficient analysis of related dynamic changes in brain activity in the EEG recordings proved that these can reflect the dynamic changes of pain intensity. In this paper, a novel method for automated assessment of pain intensity using EEG data is presented. EEG recordings from twenty-two (22) healthy volunteers are recorded with the Emotiv EPOC+ using the Cold Pressor Test (CPT) protocol. The relative power of each brain band's energy for each channel is extracted and the stochastic forest algorithm is employed for discrimination across five classes, depicting the pain intensity. Obtained results in terms of classification accuracy reached high levels (72.7%), which renders the proposed method suitable for automated pain detection and quantification of its intensity.