Skip to main content
Precision breeding and AIPain management

Comparison between AI and human expert performance in acute pain assessment in sheep

By January 3rd 2025January 14th, 2025No Comments

Document type: scientific article published in Scientific Reports

Authors: Marcelo Feighelstein, Stelio P. Luna, Nuno O. Silva, Pedro E. Trindade, Ilan Shimshoni, Dirk van der Linden & Anna Zamansky

Preview: This study explores the question whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can outperform human experts in animal pain recognition using sheep as a case study. It uses a dataset of N = 48 sheep undergoing surgery with video recordings taken before (no pain) and after (pain) surgery. Four veterinary experts used two types of pain scoring scales: the sheep facial expression scale (SFPES) and the Unesp-Botucatu composite behavioral scale (USAPS), which is the 'golden standard' in sheep pain assessment. The developed AI pipeline based on CLIP encoder significantly outperformed human facial scoring (AUC difference = 0.115, p ≤ 0.001) when having access to the same visual information (front and lateral face images). It further effectively equaled human USAPS behavioral scoring (AUC difference = 0.027, p = 0.163), but the small improvement was not statistically significant. The fact that the machine can outperform human experts in recognizing pain in sheep when exposed to the same visual information has significant implications for clinical practice, which warrant further scientific discussion.

Scientific Reports logo
From the Scientific Reports website