According to a new study, doctors can diagnose heart disease by analyzing selfies, sciencetimes reports.
The study was published in the European Heart Journal and described how a computer algorithm has been developed to analyze selfies and make a diagnosis. It was already known from other studies that there are certain facial features that are associated with cardiovascular disease (which can be seen in the ear lobe crease, wrinkles, thinning or grey hair etc.) but the new method being developed refines this method of making a diagnosis.
Professor Xiang-Yang Ji, Brain and Cognition Institute's director in Tsinghua University's Department of Automation, together with Professor Zheng, and colleagues studied 5,796 patients from eight different hospitals in China from July 2017 until March 2019. They used four different photos of each patient - one frontal, two profiles, and one aerial. The algorithm was then tested on around 1,000 patients and proved to be better at predicting heart disease than other existing models.