Sharon Moalem, geneticist and author of Survival of the Sickest, has developed an "inexpensive facial recognition tool", an app called Recognyz. The app will use technology developed for the security industry to help identify genetic and congenital disorders through pictures.
"Many medical conditions and/or syndromes have specific physical features, such as interpupillary distance and skull shape, that are used by physicians or medical allied health workers as an aid in diagnoses," Moalem's patent filing says. "For example, increased distance between the eyes of an individual can be an indicator of a condition called Noonan syndrome."
The patent adds that this feature is also found in more than thirty other conditions, but there are other physical features that would help narrow down which condition it is, such as the shape of the patient's hands.
The patent also indicates that his technology will not have all of the drawbacks of the existing method in place for using facial recognition to do a risk assessment. Some of the existing drawbacks include the difficulty of getting good measurements because children are sometimes not cooperative enough to allow for all the measurements to be properly acquired and loss of time when clinicians have to manually mark and measure all the features in the image.
Moalem is aiming to further develop his technology at an MIT hackathon so that the app could eventually be used help physicians screen for rare genetic conditions that might otherwise be missed.
"Right now the tool does only relative facial comparisons," Moalem said in a statement. "I know it can do so much more and this hackathon will be what we need to take it to the next level—and ideally, arm doctors with crucial knowledge to help patients."
Moalem has partnered with founder of marketing agency Siren Interactive, Wendy White, and the Global Genes Project, a rare disease patient advocacy organization, to which Moalem will donate the patent so the tool can be offered free of charge to physicians.
