Investigating pain perception in somatosensory cortex for healthy and fibromyalgia patient populations by using fNIRS

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Enformatik Enstitüsü, Sağlık Bilişimi Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2016

Öğrenci: AYKUT EKEN

Danışman: DİDEM GÖKÇAY

Özet:

In this study, we investigated the difference in hemodynamic responses between fibromyalgia (FM) and healthy controls via functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during application of painful stimulus and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS). We collected several clinical data (pain threshold, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) score, Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ) score, pain ratings) before and during the experiment. After data collection, we analyzed it using general linear model (GLM) and we applied classification methods to determine which cortical structures are important in discriminating healthy and patient groups. Our study showed that TENS effect was observed in both hands of healthy controls, but only left hand of FM patients. However, there is an opposite effect observed when the right hand of FM patients is stimulated. These findings indicate that the pain perception mechanism in FM syndrome needs further investigation since the outcome of the TENS treatment differs with respect to hands. When classification is done using SVM using features from the painful stimulation experiment, an accuracy of %90 is observed in distinguishing patients from healthy controls.