Using a multi-touch screen to automate pain assesment

描述（由申请人提供）： 慢性疼痛是一个严重影响数百万人生活质量的主要问题，每年花费我们的医疗保健系统数十亿美元。尽管我们对疼痛的生物学和药理学的理解取得了重大进展，但很少有新的治疗方法出现。导致这种失败的一个重要因素是缺乏高通量测定来评估啮齿动物中的疼痛治疗剂。在这个应用程序中，我们建议自动化和验证高通量仪器来评估大鼠的慢性疼痛。我们提出的仪器将基于最近推出的多点触摸输入设备和加速度计技术。我们将开发软件来自动对广泛使用的福尔马林疼痛测试中自发发生的历史验证行为进行评分。该软件将通过与专家观察员获得的数据进行比较来验证。我们设想的产品是一种经过验证的，自动化的，用户友好的，高通量的慢性疼痛测试设备。我们特别适合进行这项开发，因为我们招募了疼痛和模式识别领域的顶级专家，在构建加速度计和动物测试仪器方面拥有丰富的经验，并且拥有使用多点触摸设备进行行为测试的专利（#61416417）。 公共卫生相关性： 评估疼痛和镇痛药对大鼠的影响是一个缓慢而昂贵的过程，这给临床前疼痛研究带来了瓶颈。该系统的成功开发将通过创建一种快速，自动化和灵敏的方法来获得大鼠疼痛的行为测量来缓解这一瓶颈。该工具将推动慢性疼痛研究的许多领域的研究兴趣。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Chronic pain is a major problem that significantly affects the quality of life of millions and costs our health care system billions of dollars annually. Despite major advances in our understanding of the biology and pharmacology of pain few new therapies have emerged. One significant factor contributing to this failure is the lack of a high- throughput assay to assess pain therapeutics in rodents. In this application we propose to automate and validate a high-throughput instrument to evaluate chronic pain in rats. The instruments we propose will be based on the recently introduced technology of multi- touch input devices as well as accelerometers. We will develop software to automate the scoring of historically validated behaviors which spontaneously occur in the widely used formalin pain test. This software will be validated by comparison to data obtained by an expert human observer. The product we envision is a validated, automated, user-friendly, high-throughput chronic pain testing device. We are particularly well suited to carry out this development as we have recruited top experts in the pain and pattern recognition fields, have a great deal of experience building accelerometers and animal testing instruments and have a patent pending on the use of multi-touch devices for behavioral testing (#61416417). PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Assessing the effect of pain and analgesics in rats is a slow and costly process that creates a bottleneck in preclinical pain research. Successful development of the proposed system would alleviate this bottleneck by creating a rapid, automated and sensitive means to obtain a behavioral measure of pain in rats. This tool would advance research interests across many areas of chronic pain research.