The Face of Affective Disorders
This work addresses the need for objective, rapid, and neurobiologically-informed diagnostic tools in psychiatry, offering a potential alternative to time-consuming and subjective standard methods.
The authors tackled the problem of diagnosing affective disorders by analyzing facial behavior as a surrogate for brain arousal, achieving nearly flawless distinction between patients and healthy controls, as well as between depression and schizophrenia, using video-based recordings.
We study the statistical properties of facial behaviour altered by the regulation of brain arousal in the clinical domain of psychiatry. The underlying mechanism is linked to the empirical interpretation of the vigilance continuum as behavioral surrogate measurement for certain states of mind. Referring to the classical scalp-based obtrusive measurements, we name the presented method Opto-Electronic Encephalography (OEG) which solely relies on modern camera-based real-time signal processing and computer vision. Based upon a stochastic representation as coherence of the face dynamics, reflecting the hemifacial asymmetry in emotion expressions, we demonstrate an almost flawless distinction between patients and healthy controls as well as between the mental disorders depression and schizophrenia and the symptom severity. In contrast to the standard diagnostic process, which is time-consuming, subjective and does not incorporate neurobiological data such as real-time face dynamics, the objective stochastic modeling of the affective responsiveness only requires a few minutes of video-based facial recordings. We also highlight the potential of the methodology as a causal inference model in transdiagnostic analysis to predict the outcome of pharmacological treatment. All results are obtained on a clinical longitudinal data collection with an amount of 99 patients and 43 controls.