The Use of Fuzzy Measures in Pain Relief Control

Authors

Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Nadipuram R. Prasad

Publication Date

5-2000

Comments

UTEP-CS-99-29b.

Preliminary version published in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Medical Informatics and Fuzzy Technology MIF'99, Hanoi, Vietnam, August 27-29, 1999, pp. 447-453; full paper published in Biomedical Soft Computing and Human Sciences, 2000, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 23-30.

Abstract

Many people suffer from a continuous strong pain which is caused solely by the malfunction of the pain mechanism itself. One way to ease their pain is to electrically stimulate the spinal cord. Since the equations of pain are not known, we must use heuristic methods to find the optimal pain relief stimulation. In this paper, we show how fuzzy measures and similar nonlinear models can be used in pain relief control: they can be used to determine the parameters of the model which describes the dependence of the pain relief on the applied stimulation. Thus, fuzzy measures lead to the determination, for a given pain distribution, of the optimal pain relief stimulation.