The purpose of this study was to derive parameters that might reflect postoperative pain from photoplethysmography (PPG) and verify the derived parameters in postoperative pain assessment. We obtained preoperative and postoperative PPG and 100-mm visual analog scale (VAS) from 65 surgical patients and extracted a total of 51 PPG morphology-based parameters and their normalized parameters from these PPGs obtained. Pain discrimination performances of these derived parameters were assessed by statistical analyses, including Wilcoxon signed rank test with Bonferroni correction, classification accuracy based on logistic regression, and 4-fold cross validation. After comparing these parameters derived from PPG in pre- and post-operative conditions, statistically significant difference was found in 36 of the 51 parameters. Using logistic classification, dynamic between-pulse parameters such as normalized systolic amplitude variation and normalized diastolic amplitude variation showed better pain classification performance than the static within-pulse parameters. VAS score was 0 in every pre-operation condition, but >60 VAS was observed in the post-operative condition. Systolic peak amplitude variation normalized by PPG AC amplitude showed the best performance in classifying post-operative pain, with accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictivity values of 79.5, 74.0, 86.0, and 84.5%, respectively. These results are superior to those of the surgical pleth index (SPI, GE Healthcare, Chicago, IL, United States) at 65.9, 65.9, 66.5, and 66.5%, respectively.
Keywords: anesthesia; pain quantification; photoplethysmography; post-operative pain; surgical pain.