Computer can tell if you are feeling pain

CHICAGO - Can a computer tell when it hurts? It can if you train it, US researchers said on Tuesday.

A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain.

"The question we were trying to answer was can we use neuroimaging to objectively detect whether a person is in a state of pain or not. The answer was yes," said Dr Sean Mackey of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One.