Can a Selfie Help Detect Coronary Artery Disease?

Researchers for an interesting new paper suggested that a new algorithm may make it possible to assist in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD) with a facial photograph. The paper, published in the European Journal of Cardiology, was a multicenter, cross-sectional study of patients undergoing coronary angiography or CT angiography at nine sites in China. The purpose of evaluating the scans was to train and validate a deep convolutional neural network for CAD detection (at least one 50% stenosis) from facial photographs. The analysis included 5,796 consecutively enrolled patients who were randomly assigned to either training (n 5,216) or validation (n 580) groups for the development of the algorithm. They then enrolled 1,013 patients into the algorithm test group and calculated sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) using radiology-based diagnosis as the standard.