Designing individual-specific and trial-specific models to accurately predict the intensity of nociceptive pain from single-trial fMRI responses

Autor: Qianqian Lin, Gan Huang, Linling Li, Li Zhang, Zhen Liang, Ahmed M. Anter, Zhiguo Zhang
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: NeuroImage, Vol 225, Iss , Pp 117506- (2021)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1095-9572
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117506
Popis: Using machine learning to predict the intensity of pain from fMRI has attracted rapidly increasing interests. However, due to remarkable inter- and intra-individual variabilities in pain responses, the performance of existing fMRI-based pain prediction models is far from satisfactory. The present study proposed a new approach which can design a prediction model specific to each individual or each experimental trial so that the specific model can achieve more accurate prediction of the intensity of nociceptive pain from single-trial fMRI responses. More precisely, the new approach uses a supervised k-means method on nociceptive-evoked fMRI responses to cluster individuals or trials into a set of subgroups, each of which has similar and consistent fMRI activation patterns. Then, for a new test individual/trial, the proposed approach chooses one subgroup of individuals/trials, which has the closest fMRI patterns to the test individual/trial, as training samples to train an individual-specific or a trial-specific pain prediction model. The new approach was tested on a nociceptive-evoked fMRI dataset and achieved significantly higher prediction accuracy than conventional non-specific models, which used all available training samples to train a model. The generalizability of the proposed approach is further validated by training specific models on one dataset and testing these models on an independent new dataset. This proposed individual-specific and trial-specific pain prediction approach has the potential to be used for the development of individualized and precise pain assessment tools in clinical practice.
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