Feasibility Study of Pain Assessment by using Thermography

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Pain is a debilitating condition affecting about 20% of adults in the world. It can be considered as a warning mechanism or the response of human body to alert about a harmful state. It involves complex neuronal processes and it is considered as a personal experience with a relevant subjective component. In specific conditions, pain can be so debilitating that it alters feelings and attitudes. So pain has important physical, psychological and social consequences and it can affect the quality of life. In absence of suitable and prompt treatments, the immune system can be compromised and pain sensation can interfere with the person ability to eat, concentrate, sleep, or interact with others. Consequently, the prompt and accurate pain assessment is essential for expediting therapeutic administration. Today, assessment, management and treatment of chronic pain are still challenging goals for researchers and clinicians. Algologists operate in absence of standard objective detection tools for pain assessment. As it remains confined to a subjective experience, pain has, like gold standard for its assessment, the patients' self-report. So it is clear the need to define new objective assessing tools. In this paper, the authors propose the use of the active thermography to analyse the neurogenic inflammatory response which characterizes nociceptive pain. Preliminary results of this feasibility study are here reported. Results have shown the potentiality of thermography to be a screening biomarker of the mechanism responsible of the abnormalities in sympathetic nervous system due to pain. In fact, a clear abnormality in the thermal response of subjects suffering from pain has been recorded in several cases. Asymmetries in temperature distribution of the two limbs have been observed, and in specific cases, an unbalanced trend of the thermoregulatory response to external thermal stimuli has been even highlighted. Although, these temperature differences have not been observed in all subjects with the same intensity and frequency, data provide evidence on the potentiality about the use of thermography to analyse pain mechanism.