When Selfies Save Lives: How FDNA’s Facial Recognition Software Diagnoses Genetic Diseases

August 25, 2017

Built in Boston – “Six years ago, the Israeli cofounders of Face.com sold their facial recognition company to Facebook, and began asking: “How can we translate what we know to healthcare?”

Working with the healthcare community, they quickly identified the next frontier in health tech: Genetics.

“When we first started, we didn’t know that rare genetic disorders affect one in 10 people,” said Dekel Gelbman, CEO of FDNA. “In total, there are around 30 million Americans with rare diseases and 350 million people around the world with genetic diseases.”

Genetic diseases often manifest themselves in patients’ faces through a distinct array of features. But historically, dysmorphology — or, the practice of diagnosing a disease by looking at someone’s features — is very challenging for even the most experienced geneticist. Many families with children who have genetic disorders spend up to seven years trying to identify the disease.

FDNA aims to solve this problem and reduce the sum total of undiagnosed diseases with its software, Face2Gene, which compares photos of a patient’s face with disease composites and creates a list of potential diagnoses in seconds.”

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