Innovative Approaches to Assessment of Pain Control and Sedation in the NICU

This is a prospective, non-interventional study designed to assess noxious-specific neurophysiologic responses and clinical signs following procedural pain in infants requiring hospitalization in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) following elective surgery. The main goal of the study is to develop a method that reliably quantifies the level of pain induced from clinically-required noxious procedures to infants hospitalized in the NICU. This method will use measures of neurophysiological, autonomic, and behavioral responses to non-noxious and clinically-required noxious stimuli in order to guide the pharmacological treatment of NICU patients with analgesic agents, sedatives and/or muscle relaxants. The investigators hypothesize that resting state activity and physiological responses to noxious and non-noxious stimuli provide a more reliable assessment of the level of pain of infants hospitalized in the NICU compared to behavioral-based pain scores.