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home / diseases & conditions / heart health

could a selfie save you from a heart attack?

new study shows facial recognition technology can detect photographs for warning signs of coronary artery disease.

by skyler ash
published aug 25, 2020
read time 2 minute read
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read time 2 minute read
join the conversation
could a selfie save you from a heart attack?
selfies may be a reliable indicator of your risk for heart disease. stock/getty
selfies have been blamed for increasing narcissism, anxiety, even death, thanks to some overly ambitious/risky snapshots. but according to new research, they could also save your life.in a paper published on friday by the european heart journal, a team of chinese researchers reported that “deep learning computer algorithms” were able to correctly identify subjects at risk of coronary artery disease by analyzing four photographs — one frontal, two in profile and one of the top of the head.although the authors acknowledge that the use of selfies to screen for heart disease still has a long way to go, including broader validation of results and studies with different ethnic groups, tests of more than 1,000 people “out-performed existing methods of predicting heart disease risk.”heart conditions are already flagged through changes to patients’ faces —  among them, earlobe creases, yellowish bumps around the eyelids called xanthelasmata, and skin wrinkling. the use of selfies, writes research lead zhe zheng, a professor and vice director of china’s national center for cardiovascular diseases in china, could be a “cheap, simple and effective” way to identify patients in need of further testing.about nine million deaths worldwide were attributed to heart diseases in 2015. in canada, heart disease is the second leading cause of death, second only to cancer.technology like this isn’t without risk. an editorial also published on friday by the european heart journal, points to the potential misuse of health data, by insurance companies for example, “that can be easily extracted from a facial photo.”but this isn’t the first time selfies have been used for medical diagnosis. a team led by a developmental neuroscientist at the university of toronto has been able to measure blood pressure via video selfies with 95-percent accuracy. researchers at georgia tech and emory university in atlanta have developed an app that can detect anemia as accurately as a blood test through “patient-sourced photos” of fingernails.for that matter, a small study out of australia’s queensland university of technology found that sharing selfies with their doctors was reassuring to patients and improved the doctor-patient bond.
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