Construct validity, responsiveness and reliability of the Feline Grimace Scale in kittens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives The aim of the present study was to investigate the construct validity, responsiveness and reliability of the Feline Grimace Scale (FGS) in kittens. Methods A total of 36 healthy female kittens (aged 10 weeks to 6 months) were included in a prospective, randomized, blinded study. Video recordings of all kittens were made before and 1 and 2 h after ovariohysterectomy using an opioid-free injectable anesthetic protocol with or without multimodal analgesia. Additional recordings were taken before and 1 h after administration of rescue analgesia (buprenorphine 0.02 mg/kg IM) to painful kittens. Screenshots of facial images were collected from the video recordings for FGS scoring. Four observers blinded to treatment groups and time points scored 111 randomized images twice with a 5-week interval using the FGS. Five action units (AUs) were scored (ear position, orbital tightening, muzzle tension, whiskers position and head position; 0–2 each). Construct validity, responsiveness, and inter- and intra-rater reliability were evaluated using linear models with Benjamini–Hochberg correction, Wilcoxon signed-rank test and single intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC single ), respectively ( P <0.05). Results FGS total ratio scores were higher at 1 and 2 h after ovariohysterectomy (median [interquartile range, IQR]: 0.30 [0.20–0.40] and 0.30 [0.20–0.40], respectively) than at baseline (median [IQR]: 0.10 [0.00–0.30]) ( P <0.001). FGS total ratio scores were lower after the administration of rescue analgesia (median [IQR] before and after rescue analgesia) 0.40 [0.20–0.50] and 0.20 [0.10–0.38], respectively ( P <0.001). Inter-rater ICC single was 0.68 for the FGS total ratio scores and 0.35–0.70 for all AUs considered individually. Intra-rater ICC single was 0.77–0.91 for the FGS total ratio scores and 0.55–1.00 for all AUs considered individually. Conclusions and relevance The FGS is a valid and responsive acute pain-scoring instrument with moderate inter-rater reliability and good to excellent intra-rater reliability in kittens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".