Acute Pain in Neonates Database

Overview

Understanding and interpreting pain mechanisms in newborn babies is a complex yet vital aspect of neonatal healthcare. However, current pain assessment methods in NICUs are plagued by high subjectivity and a lack of support for continuous real-time pain monitoring. Technology-assisted methods have been explored to address these problems. However, their clinical adoption has been limited by subpar performance due to insufficient representative training data required to drive such life-critical predictive technological models.

The APN_db project aims to create a large-scale dataset of behavioural and physiological newborn responses to pain stimuli to support the development of automated multi-modal pain assessment method. The first phase of the project funded by the Horizon Impact Research Grant involved the recording of over 200 babies going through a variety of painful/painless medical procedures at the National Hospital Abuja. Each video is accompanied by framewise Neonatal Face and Limbs Acute Pain Scale (NFLAPS) scores assigned posthoc by NICU nurses. Please see the dataset's accompanying publication for a detailed description of the collection protocol, data description, pain annotation scheme and data validation measures employed in the ensuring reliability of the data for ML applications. For inquiries please contact the project PI .

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