Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Chronic pain is a frequent medical problem affecting 20% of Canadians, however there is currently noobjective way of diagnosing it. Typically, physicians rely on patients' statements and imaging studies todiagnose chronic pain. Unfortunately, patients' statements are not always accurate. Further, abnormalities on animaging study is not a reliable test for pain as many patients can either experience pain despite beinganatomically normal or have significant anatomical abnormalities but no pain at all. Another variablehampering accurate diagnosis is potential secondary pain involved as malingering pain that cannot be reliablyisolated from legitimate chronic pain. This leads to instances of patients with severe chronic pain being deniedinsurance coverage, as well as patients who are malingering receiving compensation. Sheridan College andKarmy Pain Clinics (KMC) , with locations across Ontario, seek to collaborate on this proposed appliedresearch project in order to develop a machine learning algorithm to separate real pain from malingering pain.KMC will provide the Sheridan research team with hundreds and possibly thousands of patient data files withchronic pain datapoints to train the algorithm.