Construction and validation of a pain facial expressions dataset for critically ill children

Abstract Automatic pain assessment for non-communicative children is in high demand. However, the availability of related training datasets remains limited. This study focuses on creating a large-scale dataset of pain facial expressions specifically for Chinese critically ill children and evaluating...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Longquan Jiang, Mengqi Wu, Weijia Fu, Yingwen Wang, Ying Gu, Fan Zhang, Weijuan Gong, Yan Qin, Yulu Xu, Rui Feng, Xiaobo Zhang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-05-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-02247-w
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Abstract Automatic pain assessment for non-communicative children is in high demand. However, the availability of related training datasets remains limited. This study focuses on creating a large-scale dataset of pain facial expressions specifically for Chinese critically ill children and evaluating its utility using deep learning models. Data were gathered from two intensive care units at Children’s Hospital of Fudan University. The dataset, named pain facial expression of critically ill children (PFECIC), includes 119 pain expression videos and 6951 images collected from 53 children between December 2022 and January 2023. All videos and images were independently triple labeled according to five pain levels. The PFECIC dataset was evaluated through deep learning experiments, demonstrating strong performance metrics: 88.3% accuracy, 88.3% precision, 88.7% recall, an F1-score of 88.5%, and a false-positive rate of 3.0%. Prediction errors were mostly associated with labels close to the true values. Comparative analysis with the classification of pain expressions (COPE) dataset highlighted the superiority of PFECIC in terms of accuracy, validity, and comprehensiveness.
ISSN:2045-2322