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  • Clinical Techniques
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Methods for measuring pain in laboratory animals

Abstract

Pain is one of the most important variables that members of the lab animal science community try to control and minimize, and it is a critical topic of research in clinical and basic sciences. Objective measurements of pain severity, especially in non-verbal animals that are used as disease models, can be difficult to obtain, but several developments in behavioral neuroscience are making the measurement of pain more consistent, automated and accurate.

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Figure 1: Example illustrations used for coding the rabbit facial grimace scale.
Figure 2: Examples of automated tracking of movement with various animal species.
Figure 3: The process of fingerprinting and tracking individual fish using pixel analysis.

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Graham, D., Hampshire, V. Methods for measuring pain in laboratory animals. Lab Anim 45, 99–101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/laban.962

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