First-in-human measurement and prediction of chronic pain state using intracranial neural biomarkers

Good news! Amazing stuff! It used to be what is your pain today on a scale of 1-10? Perhaps, this subjective approach is finally coming to an end! Of course, brain implanted electrodes are not exactly suitable or advisable for every pain suffering patient!

From the abstract:

"Chronic pain syndromes are often refractory to treatment and cause substantial suffering and disability. Pain severity is often measured through subjective report, while objective biomarkers that may guide diagnosis and treatment are lacking. Also, which brain activity underlies chronic pain on clinically relevant timescales, or how this relates to acute pain, remains unclear. Here four individuals with refractory neuropathic pain were implanted with chronic intracranial electrodes in the anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Participants reported pain metrics coincident with ambulatory, direct neural recordings obtained multiple times daily over months. We successfully predicted intraindividual chronic pain severity scores from neural activity with high sensitivity using machine learning methods. Chronic pain decoding relied on sustained power changes from the OFC, which tended to differ from transient patterns of activity associated with acute, evoked pain states during a task. Thus, intracranial OFC signals can be used to predict spontaneous, chronic pain state in patients."

First-in-human prediction of chronic pain state using intracranial neural biomarkers | Nature Neuroscience (no public access, but here is a link to the PDF file)