The Autonomic Response to Noxious and Innocuous Stimuli as Measured by Functional NIR Spectroscopy
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
1:00 PM-3:00 PM
BIOMED PhD Research Proposal
Title:
The Autonomic Response to Noxious and Innocuous Stimuli as Measured by Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy
Speaker:
Daryl Omire-Mayor, PhD Candidate, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Advisor:
Kambiz Pourrezaei, PhD, Professor, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Abstract:
One hundred million Americans suffer from chronic pain. It is not only a symptom that results from certain diseases or injuries, but at times can be the disease itself. Currently there is no accepted objective method for clinicians to use that can quantitatively measure this pain for proper diagnosis and treatment purposes. Current pain treatment methods include using psychological analyses and other perceptive measures to give an indication of the level of pain being experienced by a patient, and give indication as to the treatment method that would be most beneficial. While this approach has some merit since pain has heavily been described as perceptive, it fails to identify a proper biomarker that can be used as an appropriate treatment method. Presently, clinicians struggle to find a cost effective system that can assist in objectively measuring different types of pain in patients who are unable to verbally communicate pain level experienced. The proposed research would fulfill the need of a standard method of measuring pain to complement current methods in appropriately diagnosing/treating those with mild to chronic pain problems.
As a part of the peripheral nervous system, there is the autonomic nervous system, that for the most part, involuntarily controls our bodies’ regulatory functions. Within the autonomic nervous system there is the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for our bodies physiological reaction to an event that is perceived as threatening or harmful in any way, also termed the “fight-or-flight” response. In experimental use of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the unique feature that is taken advantage of is the fight-or-flight response. What this does is tell the body that there is some external stimulus that is being experienced by the body. In the “fight-or-flight” response, as the name indicates, the decision that is plaguing the brain at that moment is to fight the arousal away or flee from the location of the stimulus. While the brain typically experiences pain in a multitude of areas that all contribute to the pain experience (i. e. the pain matrix), this unique feature of the autonomic nervous system allows for the use of fNIRS on the forehead to take measurements that relate to a painful experience.
Reliable biomarkers are of great need and importance in evidence-based, personalized management of pain. fNIRS has been used as a method to objectively measure the autonomic response to noxious stimuli and has proven to be linked to subjective pain responses. Given this information, preliminary results of the proposed research suggest that fNIRS has the potential to be used as a technique for identifying robust biomarkers for pain and individual responses to noxious stimuli.
Contact Information
Ken Barbee
215-895-1335
barbee@drexel.edu