AUTHOR=Gkikas Stefanos , Tachos Nikolaos S. , Andreadis Stelios , Pezoulas Vasileios C. , Zaridis Dimitrios , Gkois George , Matonaki Anastasia , Stavropoulos Thanos G. , Fotiadis Dimitrios I. TITLE=Multimodal automatic assessment of acute pain through facial videos and heart rate signals utilizing transformer-based architectures JOURNAL=Frontiers in Pain Research VOLUME=5 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pain-research/articles/10.3389/fpain.2024.1372814 DOI=10.3389/fpain.2024.1372814 ISSN=2673-561X ABSTRACT=

Accurate and objective pain evaluation is crucial in developing effective pain management protocols, aiming to alleviate distress and prevent patients from experiencing decreased functionality. A multimodal automatic assessment framework for acute pain utilizing video and heart rate signals is introduced in this study. The proposed framework comprises four pivotal modules: the Spatial Module, responsible for extracting embeddings from videos; the Heart Rate Encoder, tasked with mapping heart rate signals into a higher dimensional space; the AugmNet, designed to create learning-based augmentations in the latent space; and the Temporal Module, which utilizes the extracted video and heart rate embeddings for the final assessment. The Spatial-Module undergoes pre-training on a two-stage strategy: first, with a face recognition objective learning universal facial features, and second, with an emotion recognition objective in a multitask learning approach, enabling the extraction of high-quality embeddings for the automatic pain assessment. Experiments with the facial videos and heart rate extracted from electrocardiograms of the BioVid database, along with a direct comparison to 29 studies, demonstrate state-of-the-art performances in unimodal and multimodal settings, maintaining high efficiency. Within the multimodal context, 82.74% and 39.77% accuracy were achieved for the binary and multi-level pain classification task, respectively, utilizing 9.62 million parameters for the entire framework.