Neuroimaging Assessment of Pain

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. Understanding the neural mechanisms of acute and chronic pain and the brain changes affecting pain factors is important for finding pain treatment methods. The emergence and progress of non-invasive neuroimaging technology can help us better understand pain at the neural level. Recent developments in identifying brain-based biomarkers of pain through advances in advanced imaging can provide some foundations for predicting and detecting pain. For example, a neurologic pain signature (involving brain regions that receive nociceptive afferents) and a stimulus intensity-independent pain signature (involving brain regions that do not show increased activity in proportion to noxious stimulus intensity) were developed based on multivariate modeling to identify processes related to the pain experience. However, an accurate and comprehensive review of common neuroimaging techniques for evaluating pain is lacking. This paper reviews the mechanism, clinical application, reliability, strengths, and limitations of common neuroimaging techniques for assessing pain to promote our further understanding of pain.