Development of a spontaneous pain indicator based on brain cellular calcium using deep learning

Heera Yoon, Myeong Seong Bak, Seung Ha Kim, Ji Hwan Lee, Geehoon Chung, Sang Jeong Kim, Sun Kwang Kim

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Chronic pain remains an intractable condition in millions of patients worldwide. Spontaneous ongoing pain is a major clinical problem of chronic pain and is extremely challenging to diagnose and treat compared to stimulus-evoked pain. Although extensive efforts have been made in preclinical studies, there still exists a mismatch in pain type between the animal model and humans (i.e., evoked vs. spontaneous), which obstructs the translation of knowledge from preclinical animal models into objective diagnosis and effective new treatments. Here, we developed a deep learning algorithm, designated AI-bRNN (Average training, Individual test-bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network), to detect spontaneous pain information from brain cellular Ca2+ activity recorded by two-photon microscopy imaging in awake, head-fixed mice. AI-bRNN robustly determines the intensity and time points of spontaneous pain even in chronic pain models and evaluates the efficacy of analgesics in real time. Furthermore, AI-bRNN can be applied to various cell types (neurons and glia), brain areas (cerebral cortex and cerebellum) and forms of somatosensory input (itch and pain), proving its versatile performance. These results suggest that our approach offers a clinically relevant, quantitative, real-time preclinical evaluation platform for pain medicine, thereby accelerating the development of new methods for diagnosing and treating human patients with chronic pain.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1179-1187
Number of pages9
JournalExperimental and Molecular Medicine
Volume54
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2022

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© 2022, The Author(s).

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