The topic of acute pain, especially post-operative pain, risks being unfairly relegated to the background. Although significant progress has been made in pediatric anesthesia, with a drastic reduction in perioperative mortality and morbidity, much remains to be done in terms of organization and training. Artificial intelligence can potentially help here. Combining data from large, well-structured datasets can provide predictive models that guide patients at higher risk of developing pain. Having reliable alerts would allow resources to be used not only more effectively, but also more rationally. Furthermore, artificial intelligence could help us diagnose and measure the pain of all those patients with cognitive barriers, exploiting nonverbal communication.
Vittori et al. (Sun,) studied this question.