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Introduction: Pain assessment is extremely important in patients unable to communicate and it is often done by clinical judgement. However, assessing pain using observable indicators can be challenging for clinicians due to the subjective perceptions, individual differences in pain expression, and potential confounding factors. Therefore, the need for an objective pain assessment method that can assist medical practitioners. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has shown promising results to assess the neural function in response of nociception and pain. Previous studies have explored the use of machine learning with hand-crafted features in the assessment of pain. Methods: In this study, we aim to expand previous studies by exploring the use of deep learning models Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and (CNN-LSTM) to automatically extract features from fNIRS data and by comparing these with classical machine learning models using hand-crafted features. Results: The results showed that the deep learning models exhibited favourable results in the identification of different types of pain in our experiment using only fNIRS input data. The combination of CNN and LSTM in a hybrid model (CNNLSTM) exhibited the highest performance (accuracy = 91.2%) in our problem setting. Statistical analysis using one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s (post-hoc) test performed on accuracies showed that the deep learning models significantly improved accuracy performance as compared to the baseline models. Discussion: Overall, deep learning models showed their potential to learn features automatically without relying on manually-extracted features and the CNN-LSTM model could be used as a possible method of assessment of pain in non-verbal patients. Future research is needed to evaluate the generalisation of this method of pain assessment on independent populations and in real-life scenarios [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pain diagnosis for nonverbal patients represents a challenge in clinical settings. Neuroimaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), have shown promising results to assess neuronal function in response to nociception and pain. Recent studies suggest that neuroimaging in conjunction with machine learning models can be used to predict different cognitive tasks. The aim of this study is to expand previous studies by exploring the classification of fNIRS signals (oxyhaemoglobin) according to temperature level (cold and hot) and corresponding pain intensity (low and high) using machine learning models. Toward this aim, we used the quantitative sensory testing to determine pain threshold and pain tolerance to cold and heat in 18 healthy subjects (three females), mean age ± standard deviation (31.9 ± 5.5). The classification model is based on the bag-of-words approach, a histogram representation used in document classification based on the frequencies of extracted words and adapted for time series; two learning algorithms were used separately, K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) and support vector machines (SVM). A comparison between two sets of fNIRS channels was also made in the classification task, all 24 channels and 8 channels from the somatosensory region defined as our region of interest (RoI). The results showed that K-NN obtained slightly better results (92.08%) than SVM (91.25%) using the 24 channels; however, the performance slightly dropped using only channels from the RoI with K-NN (91.53%) and SVM (90.83%). These results indicate potential applications of fNIRS in the development of a physiologically based diagnosis of human pain that would benefit vulnerable patients who cannot self-report pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming a vital role in our current modern life for detecting and collecting data about a natural or built environment, including human body. One of the reasons is due to WSNs have very attractive advantages. But one of the problems is internal attacks that have gained prominence and posed most challenging threats to all WSNs. In this paper, we extend our discussion at the conference of the AISC 2016 to an effective algorithm to make an evaluation for detecting internal attack by evidentiary assessment for protecting a WSN from the internal attacks with multi-criteria in real-time. This protecting is based on the combination of the multiple pieces of evidences collected from the nodes suffering from an internal attacker in a network. A decision made is carefully discussed based on the Dempster–Shafer Theory (DST). One of the advantages of this proposed method is that it is not just making a performance in real-time but also it is effective due to it does not need the knowledge about the normal or malicious node in advance with very high average accuracy that is close to 100%. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study aims to identify a set of indicators to estimate cognitive workload using a multimodal sensing approach and machine learning. A set of three cognitive tests were conducted to induce cognitive workload in twelve participants at two levels of task difficulty (Easy and Hard). Four sensors were used to measure the participants' physiological change, including, Electrocardiogram (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), respiration (RESP), and blood oxygen saturation (SpO2). To understand the perceived cognitive workload, NASA-TLX was used after each test and analysed using Chi-Square test. Three well-know classifiers (LDA, SVM, and DT) were trained and tested independently using the physiological data. The statistical analysis showed that participants' perceived cognitive workload was significantly different ( ) between the tests, which demonstrated the validity of the experimental conditions to induce different cognitive levels. Classification results showed that a fusion of ECG and EDA presented good discriminating power (acc = 0.74) for cognitive workload detection. This study provides preliminary results in the identification of a possible set of indicators of cognitive workload. Future work needs to be carried out to validate the indicators using more realistic scenarios and with a larger population.