Biomedical Engineering

Department of Engineering

Chronic pain is estimated to affect up to 20% of the population at some point in their lives. Unfortunately many drug treatments are either ineffective or have significant side effects, leaving many people with pain with little or no adequate treatment. This has stimulated the search for new, innovate ways of treating pain. Dr Ben Seymour, a Wellcome Clinical Fellow at the Computation and Biological Learning Lab, and Dr Dan Wheeler, Consultant Anaesthetist in the Pain Clinic at Addenbrookes Hospital, are hoping to develop a new method using functional brain imaging. They aim to apply engineering-based machine learning methods to ‘decode’ the early changes in brain activity that are thought to contribute to the maintenance of chronic back pain, and then feed back the abnormal activity so that subjects can learn to consciously control it. If this works, this could become a new avenue for treating patients with back pain.

Dr. Ben Seymour Department of Engineering
Dr. Dan Wheeler Consultant Anaesthetist, Pain Clinic