Chronic pain is a multi-dimensional experience, and pain intensity plays an important part, impacting the patients emotional balance, psychology, and behaviour. Standard self-reporting tools, such as the Visual Analogue Scale for pain, fail to capture this burden. Moreover, this type of tools is susceptible to a degree of subjectivity, dependent on the patients clear understanding of how to use it, social biases, and their ability to translate a complex experience to a scale. To overcome these and other self-reporting challenges, pain intensity estimation has been previously studied based on facial expressions, electroencephalograms, brain imaging, and autonomic features. However, to the best of our knowledge, it has never been attempted to base this estimation on the patient narratives of the personal experience of chronic pain, which is what we propose in this work. Indeed, in the clinical assessment and management of chronic pain, verbal communication is essential to convey information to physicians that would otherwise not be easily accessible through standard reporting tools, since language, sociocultural, and psychosocial variables are intertwined. We show that language features from patient narratives indeed convey information relevant for pain intensity estimation, and that our computational models can take advantage of that. Specifically, our results show that patients with mild pain focus more on the use of verbs, whilst moderate and severe pain patients focus on adverbs, and nouns and adjectives, respectively, and that these differences allow for the distinction between these three pain classes.
翻译:慢性疼痛是多方面的经历,疼痛强度是影响病人情感平衡、心理和行为的重要部分。标准自我报告工具,如视像分析仪的疼痛比例表,未能抓住这一负担。此外,这种工具具有一定程度的主观性,取决于病人对如何使用它、社会偏见及其将复杂经历转化为规模的能力的明确理解。为了克服这些挑战和其他自我报告的挑战,以前已经根据面部表情、电脑图、脑成像和自主特征对疼痛强度估计进行了重要研究。然而,据我们所知,我们从未尝试过用慢性疼痛个人经历的病人描述来进行这种估计。事实上,在临床评估和管理慢性疼痛时,口头沟通对于向医生传递信息至关重要,否则无法通过标准的报告工具轻易获得这些信息,因为这些语言、社会文化和心理社会变量是相互交织的。我们显示,病人叙述中的语言特征确实传达了与疼痛强度估计有关的信息,而我们的三个计算模型却从未尝试过以慢性疼痛的个人经历的病人描述为基础,这是我们在这项工作中所建议的。事实上,在临床评估和管理慢性疼痛时,口头沟通对于向医生传递信息至关重要,因为我们的疼痛和痛苦的偏重度和痛苦的偏重。