THERE is something of the 19th century about the science of dysmorphology. The idea that medical conditions, such as Down’s or Angelman’s syndromes, whose main consequences are neurological and behavioural, imprint themselves on the body’s shape in ways reliable enough to be used for diagnosis sounds disturbingly like phrenology or physiognomy. Be that as it may, they do—and for these and many other developmental disorders, dysmorphology works. Indeed, on this basis, the 16th-century painting above is thought to be of a child with Angelman’s.
A group of researchers at Oxford University would, though, like to make dysmorphology work better. They want to bring it into the 21st-century world of face-recognition technology, and thus extend its range. Christoffer Nellaker and Andrew Zisserman began from three premises. First, of the 6,000 known developmental disorders, about half express themselves, in part, in the face. Second, most are so rare that a doctor is unlikely to come across any given one of them during his career, so he will have no chance to learn how to recognise them. Third, they are nevertheless, in aggregate, common enough that...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1RvSQgs
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