Placebo Modeling : predicting patient pain from personality traits

Details

Supervisors

Dupont, Pierre ; Branders, Samuel

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en informatique

Abstract

The importance of properly evaluating the placebo effect becomes more and more important as the gap between new drugs effect and the placebo effect shrinks, leading to the refusal of multiple new treatments. This thesis is realized in collaboration with Tools4Patient, a Belgian company developing a tool named Placebell that predicts the Individual Placebo Response (IPR) of the patients by using their answers to a psychological questionnaire (representing their personality). In this thesis, the relationship between the pain of patients and their personality is evaluated using predictive regression models. The evaluation of such a relationship is interesting for Tools4Patient as it could be used to improve their products as well as giving them new leads for further development. To measure the placebo effect, the pain before and after taking the placebo are needed. If these are wrongly assessed by the patients from the beginning, the placebo effect measured will not be correct. The focus is on the baseline pain (the pain before taking the placebo). It is possible for a patient to badly evaluate it, depending on external factors such as his mood or the weather for example. The ultimate goal is to predict this pain using personality in order to correct the reported pain. Our work is divided into two parts. On one hand there is an investigation of the questionnaire data and the patient pain and on the other hand the prediction of the baseline pain of a patient using his personality. Our focus for the first task is feature extraction : finding which part of the personality is the most relevant when it comes to pain. A quite stable set of questions (rallying several parts of the personality) was found. As for the second task, our goal is to identify the promising ways of making predictions. The results of our experiments in this regard are indeed quite promising and show the existence of a relationship between the personality of a patient and his baseline pain.