Facial recognition can unlock your phone, help to fight crime and as the time passes, can be used in many more more cases. Now it can even diagnose certain genetic diseases based on people’s faces thanks to the DeepGestalt.
Rare disorders often show up in someone’s appearance and because of that you are sometimes able to identify the condition of the patient based of his facial traits. Researchers have trained artificial intelligence to recognize these features making it possible to make a quick and cheap diagnosis. They trained the neural network, called DeepGestalt, with the pictures of T 17,000 kids with 200-plus genetic disorders. In a test with 502 new images, DeepGestalt successfully placed the correct syndrome in its top 10 list 91% of the time outperforming the doctors in this field.
“DeepGestalt is a facial image analysis framework that is able to highlight similarities to hundreds of genetic disorders” – Yaron Gurovich, chief technology officer at FDNA
This tool in combination with genome testing can easily be used to help doctors search for specific genetic markers and make an accurate diagnosis much more efficiently and effectively. And even though there is still a long way for it to be perfect, there is a huge chance that it might be once used in everyday life.
On the other hand, given how easy it is to photograph a face, the tool could be abused by employers or insurance providers to discriminate against people with a high probability of having certain disorders. Luckily, it is said that the tool will only be available to clinicians.
Sources:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/artificial-intelligence-could-diagnose-rare-disorders-using-just-photo-face
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2189683-ai-can-identify-rare-genetic-disorders-by-the-shape-of-someones-face/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/fdna-deepgestalt-facial-recognition/amp/