Researchers want you to share your selfies for science

A team of international researchers is urging people to share their selfies in order to help teach computers how to read faces and identify people with rare diseases. The Minerva and Me project - being led by Oxford University with the help of international researchers like WA Health clinical genetist Gareth Baynam - is seeking to use technology to spot rare diseases faster and more accurately. The crowd-sourced research initiative wants to build a database of photographs so the researchers can develop facial recognition software using machine learning algorithms that can identify rare diseases. The software would be able to suggest a disease condition and prompt further tests that could be used to help settle on a diagnosis - potentially reducing the instances of incorrect diagnosis. "We think computers can be used to help diagnose individuals who have particular diseases. To do this we are training computers to look at photographs of peoples' faces to try to identify combinations of subtle changes that might together be indicators of a specific disease," the researchers say.