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Papers of the Week


Papers: 7 May 2022 - 13 May 2022


Animal Studies


2022 May 11


Pain


Editor's Pick

Automated preclinical detection of mechanical pain hypersensitivity and analgesia.

Authors

Zhang Z, Roberson DP, Kotoda M, Boivin B, Bohnslav JP, González-Cano R, Yarmolinsky DA, Lenfers Turnes R, Wimalasena NK, Neufeld SQ, Barrett L, Quintão NLM, Fattori V, Taub DG, Wiltschko AB, Andrews N, Harvey CD, Datta S R, Woolf CJ
Pain. 2022 May 11.
PMID: 35543646.

Abstract

The lack of sensitive and robust behavioral assessments of pain in preclinical models has been a major limitation for both pain research and the development of novel analgesics. Here we demonstrate a novel data acquisition and analysis platform that provides automated, quantitative, and objective measures of naturalistic rodent behavior in an observer-independent and unbiased fashion. The technology records freely-behaving mice, in the dark, over extended periods for continuous acquisition of two parallel video data streams: 1) near-infrared frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) for detecting the degree, force and timing of surface contact, and 2) simultaneous ongoing video-graphing of whole-body pose. Using machine vision and machine learning we automatically extract and quantify behavioral features from these data to reveal moment-by-moment changes that capture the internal pain state of rodents in multiple pain models. We show that these voluntary pain-related behaviors are reversible by analgesics and that analgesia can be automatically and objectively differentiated from sedation. Finally, we used this approach to generate a paw luminance ratio measure that is sensitive in capturing dynamic mechanical hypersensitivity over a period of time and scalable for high-throughput pre-clinical analgesic efficacy assessment.