MATLAB® Utility for Small Invasive Procedure to Confirm Objectively the New Disease – Chronic Pain

A new disease, named a chronic pain, which affects more than 20% of adult population, has been recognized. The chronic pain patients need to cope with the effects of that treatment resistant being to an ailment such as emotional overloading, disability, sleep and mood disturbances, etc. A novel idea for the effective chronic pain control is focused on identifying one of the three possible pain mechanisms: a nociceptive, neuropathic, or a nociplastic pain related to the central sensitization (CS). This differentiation means that the treatment should follow the pain type. However, the problem of determining the dominant pain component has not yet been solved. The current trend in the research related to pain diagnostics is a desire to define an objective tool for the CS confirmation. It is hypothesized that the autonomic nervous system, dysregulation measurement (response to noxious stimuli) can be one of the parameters for the objective CS confirmation. The new validated and awarded method to confirm the myofascial pain syndrome (MPS) dependent on the central sensitisation process has been presented. The protocol of the method is considered a new type of the active dynamic thermography. The involvement of the CS related to muscles is confirmed objectively being based on the visualization of the perceived pain area by presenting the vasomotor response to stimulation. Unfortunately, the main disadvantages of that method is time consuming of the manual thermal data analysis. The use of the MATLAB® software for the thermal data analysis seems interesting for consideration.