EMOPAIN Challenge 2020: Multimodal Pain Evaluation from Facial and Bodily Expressions.

The EmoPain 2020 Challenge is the first international competition aimed at creating a uniform platform for the comparison of machine learning and multimedia processing methods of automatic chronic pain assessment from human expressive behaviour, and also the identification of pain-related behaviours. The objective of the challenge is to promote research in the development of assistive technologies that help improve the quality of life for people with chronic pain via real-time monitoring and feedback to help manage their condition and remain physically active. The challenge also aims to encourage the use of the relatively underutilised, albeit vital bodily expression signals for automatic pain and pain-related emotion recognition. This paper presents a description of the challenge, competition guidelines, bench-marking dataset, and the baseline systems' architecture and performance on the three sub-tasks: pain estimation from facial expressions, pain recognition from multimodal movement, and protective movement behaviour detection.PSRC grant Emotion& Pain Project; NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centr

A computational framework for measuring the facial emotional expressions

NoThe purpose of this chapter is to discuss and present a computational framework for detecting and analysing facial expressions efficiently. The approach here is to identify the face and estimate regions of facial features of interest using the optical flow algorithm. Once the regions and their dynamics are computed a rule based system can be utilised for classification. Using this framework, we show how it is possible to accurately identify and classify facial expressions to match with FACS coding and to infer the underlying basic emotions in real time

Early umbilical cord blood-derived stem cell transplantation does not prevent neurological deterioration in mucopolysaccharidosis type III

Mucopolysaccharidosis type III (MPS III), or Sanfilippo disease, is a neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disease (LSD) caused by defective lysosomal degradation of heparan sulfate (HS). No effective disease-modifying therapy is yet available. In contrast to some other neuronopathic LSDs, bone marrow-derived hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) fails to prevent neurological deterioration in MPS III patients. We report on the 5-year outcome of early transplantation, i.e., before onset of clinical neurological disease, in combination with the use of umbilical cord blood-derived hematopoietic stem cells (UCBT), in two MPS III patients. Both patients had a normal developmental quotient at the time of UCBT. One patient had a combination of mutations predicting a classical severe phenotype (MPS IIIA), and one patient (MPS IIIB) had mutations predicting a very attenuated phenotype. Transplantation was uncomplicated with full engraftment of donor cells in both. Both patients showed progressive neurological deterioration with regression of cognitive skills and behavioral disturbances during 5 years after successful UCBT, comparable to the natural history of patients with the same combination of mutations. The concentration of HS in CSF in the patient with the attenuated phenotype of MPS IIIB 2 years after UCBT was very high and in the range of untreated MPS III patients. We conclude that the course of cognitive development, behavioral problems, and absence of biochemical correction in CSF demonstrate the absence of relevant effect of UCBT in MPS III patients, even when performed before clinical onset of CNS disease