Diagnosing Rare Diseases with Facial Analysis

Harnessing the power of computers to diagnose rare, genetic diseases is not new idea, but Dekel Gelbman is using Big Data to analyze a patient’s phenotype as a clue to his or her genotype. His company FDNA has developed Face2Gene, a platform for analyzing an image of a patient’s face to help arrive at a diagnosis. We spoke to Gelbman about the challenges of diagnosing a rare disease, how Face2Gene works, and why it could accelerate the process of getting a diagnosis.