With a smartphone and an app, qualified healthcare professionals can now diagnose fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) in their office. A newly developed system was trained to recognize the alcohol-related disorder. The app, which can diagnose 300 of the more common genetic disorders, is called Face2Gene and uses facial analysis technology.

App helps clinicians diagnose fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) in the office.
(Credit: UNMC)

Using photographs from patients who were diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), partial FAS, and alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorders (ARND) against control subjects, the researchers found surprising results: The system picked up on ARND at a better rate than the clinicians.

The way the app works is simple. Once a clinician takes a photograph of the person’s face utilizing the app, the image is transmitted to a secure HIPAA-compliant server that calculates ratios of different points of the face. This digitized data is then compared to known digitized syndromes and the results are sent back to the user. All of this takes place within 4 seconds.

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