Pain Detection in Biophysiological Signals: Knowledge Transfer from Short-Term to Long-Term Stimuli Based on Distance-Specific Segment Selection

Abstract

In this study, we analyze a signal segmentation-specific pain duration transfer task by applying knowledge transfer from short-term (phasic) pain stimuli to long-term (tonic) pain stimuli. To this end, we focus on the physiological signals of the X-ITE Pain Database. We evaluate different distance-based segment selection approaches with the aim of identifying individual segments of the corresponding tonic stimuli that lead to the best classification performance. The phasic domain is used to train the classification model. In the first main step, we compute class-specific prototypes for the phasic domain. In the second main step, we compute the distances between all segments of the tonic samples and each prototype. The segment with the lowest distance to the prototypes is then fed to the classifier. Our analysis includes the evaluation of a variety of distance metrics, namely the Euclidean, Bray–Curtis, Canberra, Chebyshev, City-Block and Wasserstein distances. Our results show that in combination with most of the metrics used, the distance-based selection of one individual segment outperforms the naive approach in which the tonic stimuli are fed to the phasic domain-based classification model without any adaptation. Moreover, most of the evaluated distance-based segment selection approaches lead to outcomes that are close to the classification performance, which is obtained by focusing on the respective best segments. For instance, for the trapezius (TRA) signal, in combination with the electric pain domain, we obtained an averaged accuracy of 68.0%, while the naive approach led to 66.0%. For the thermal pain domain, in combination with the electrodermal activity (EDA) signal, we obtained an averaged accuracy of 59.6%, outperforming the naive approach, which led to 53.2%.