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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Matthew Leach
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2018 Dalla Costa et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Pain recognition is fundamental for safeguarding animal welfare. Facial expressions have been investigated in several species and grimace scales have been developed as pain assessment tool in many species including horses (HGS) and mice (MGS). This study is intended to progress the validation of grimace scales, by proposing a statistical approach to identify a classifier that can estimate the pain status of the animal based on Facial Action Units (FAUs) included in HGS and MGS. To achieve this aim, through a validity study, the relation between FAUs included in HGS and MGS and the real pain condition was investigated. A specific statistical approach (Cumulative Link Mixed Model, Inter-rater reliability, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Support Vector Machines) was applied to two datasets. Our results confirm the reliability of both scales and show that individual FAU scores of HGS and MGS are related to the pain state of the animal. Finally, we identified the optimal weights of the FAU scores that can be used to best classify animals in pain with an accuracy greater than 70%. For the first time, this study describes a statistical approach to develop a classifier, based on HGS and MGS, for estimating the pain status of animals. The classifier proposed is the starting point to develop a computer-based image analysis for the automatic recognition of pain in horses and mice.
Author(s): Costa ED, Pascuzzo R, Leach MC, Dai F, Lebelt D, Vantini S, Minero M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: PLoS ONE
Year: 2018
Volume: 13
Issue: 8
Online publication date: 01/08/2018
Acceptance date: 25/06/2018
Date deposited: 13/08/2018
ISSN (electronic): 1932-6203
Publisher: Public Library of Science
URL: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200339
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200339
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