Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35069957›Full record

ArticlePain research & management2022

Automatic Coding of Facial Expressions of Pain: Are We There Yet?

Stefan Lautenbacher, Teena Hassan, Dominik Seuss, Frederik W Loy, Jens-Uwe Garbas, Ute Schmid, Miriam Kunz

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Pain research & management, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
5citing papers in PubMed
3.2field-weighted citation impact, top 7% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

5 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Pain in the Context of Virtual Neuropsychological Assessment of Older Adults.Archives of clinical neuropsychology : the official journal of the National Academy of Neuropsychologists · 2024
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.

Stefan LautenbacherPhysiological Psychology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg 96047, Germany.ORCID 0000-0002-2829-347X
Teena HassanCenter for Cognitive Interaction Technology CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld 33619, Germany.
Dominik SeussElectronic Imaging Department, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Erlangen 91058, Germany.
Frederik W LoyPhysiological Psychology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg 96047, Germany.ORCID 0000-0002-5118-0641
Jens-Uwe GarbasDigital Sensory Perception, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Erlangen 91058, Germany.
Ute SchmidCognitive Systems, University of Bamberg, Bamberg 96047, Germany.
Miriam KunzMedical Psychology and Sociology, University of Augsburg, Augsburg 86159, Germany.
University of Bamberg · DEFraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits · DEBielefeld University · DEUniversity of Augsburg · DE

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

introductionThe experience of pain is regularly accompanied by facial expressions. The gold standard for analyzing these facial expressions is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which provides so-called action units (AUs) as parametrical indicators of facial muscular activity. Particular combinations of AUs have appeared to be pain-indicative. The manual coding of AUs is, however, too time- and labor-intensive in clinical practice. New developments in automatic facial expression analysis have promised to enable automatic detection of AUs, which might be used for pain detection.

objectiveOur aim is to compare manual with automatic AU coding of facial expressions of pain.

methodsFaceReader7 was used for automatic AU detection. We compared the performance of FaceReader7 using videos of 40 participants (20 younger with a mean age of 25.7 years and 20 older with a mean age of 52.1 years) undergoing experimentally induced heat pain to manually coded AUs as gold standard labeling. Percentages of correctly and falsely classified AUs were calculated, and we computed as indicators of congruency, "sensitivity/recall," "precision," and "overall agreement (F1)."

resultsThe automatic coding of AUs only showed poor to moderate outcomes regarding sensitivity/recall, precision, and F1. The congruency was better for younger compared to older faces and was better for pain-indicative AUs compared to other AUs.

conclusionAt the moment, automatic analyses of genuine facial expressions of pain may qualify at best as semiautomatic systems, which require further validation by human observers before they can be used to validly assess facial expressions of pain.

Indexed as

Facial ExpressionPainAdultHumansMiddle Aged

Identifiers

PMID35069957
PMCPMC8767386
OpenAlexW4206549527

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.