Figure 1.

Flowchart describing the identification of pain related electrophysiological features and applications in both basic and clinical pain study. Nociceptive somatosensory inputs can elicit transient changes in the ongoing electroencephalography (EEG) activities, including phase-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) and non-phase-locked modulations of ongoing oscillatory activities in multiple frequency bands (appeared as event-related desynchronization or synchronization, ERD or ERS). The phase-locked ERPs activities could be obtained by the classical across-trial averaging process, characterized by their peak latency, amplitude, scalp topography, and neural generators, while the non-phase-locked ERD/ERS activities could be identified using time-frequency analysis (TFA), characterized by several parameters including latency, frequency, magnitude, scalp topography, phase, neural generator, casual information flows, and cross-frequency couplings (CFCs). The assessment of the relationship between human pain perception and electrophysiological responses has the potential applications in both basic and clinical pain study, including: (1) exploring electrophysiological signatures coding subjective pain perception; (2) predicting subjective pain intensity; (3) exploring pathological mechanisms of chronic pain; and (4) relieving pain modulating the cortical oscillatory activities using neurofeedback techniques.