Decoding pain from brain activity
Pain is a dynamic, complex and multidimensional experience. The identification of pain from brain
activity as neural readout may effectively provide a neural code for pain, and further provide
useful information for pain diagnosis and treatment. Advances in neuroimaging and large-scale
electrophysiology have enabled us to examine neural activity with improved spatial and temporal
resolution, providing opportunities to decode pain in humans and freely behaving animals. This
topical review provides a systematical overview of state-of-the-art methods for decoding pain from
brain signals, with special emphasis on electrophysiological and neuroimaging modalities. We show
how pain decoding analyses can help pain diagnosis and discovery of neurobiomarkers for chronic
pain. Finally, we discuss the challenges in the research field and point to several important future
research directions.