The degree to which a surgical patient’s subconscious processing of pain, or “nociception,” is properly managed by their anesthesiologist will directly affect the degree of post-operative drug side effects they’ll experience and the need for further pain management they’ll require. But pain is a subjective feeling to measure, even when patients are awake, much less when they are unconscious. In a new study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers describe a set of statistical models that objectively quantified nociception during…
