1. GestaltMatcher: Overcoming the limits of rare disease matching using facial phenotypic descriptors
- Author
-
Tzung-Chien Hsieh, Aviram Bar-Haim, Shahida Moosa, Nadja Ehmke, Karen W. Gripp, Jean Tori Pantel, Magdalena Danyel, Martin Atta Mensah, Denise Horn, Stanislav Rosnev, Nicole Fleischer, Guilherme Bonini, Alexander Hustinx, Alexander Schmid, Alexej Knaus, Behnam Javanmardi, Hannah Klinkhammer, Hellen Lesmann, Sugirthan Sivalingam, Tom Kamphans, Wolfgang Meiswinkel, Frédéric Ebstein, Elke Krüger, Sébastien Küry, Stéphane Bézieau, Axel Schmidt, Sophia Peters, Hartmut Engels, Elisabeth Mangold, Martina Kreiß, Kirsten Cremer, Claudia Perne, Regina C. Betz, Tim Bender, Kathrin Grundmann-Hauser, Tobias B. Haack, Matias Wagner, Theresa Brunet, Heidi Beate Bentzen, Luisa Averdunk, Kimberly Christine Coetzer, Gholson J. Lyon, Malte Spielmann, Christian Schaaf, Stefan Mundlos, Markus M. Nöthen, and Peter Krawitz
- Subjects
Phenotype ,Rare Diseases ,Artificial Intelligence ,Face ,Humans ,Neural Networks, Computer ,Article - Abstract
A large fraction of monogenic disorders causes craniofacial abnormalities with characteristic facial morphology. These disorders can be diagnosed more efficiently with the support of computer-aided next-generation phenotyping tools, such as DeepGestalt. These tools have learned to associate facial phenotypes with the underlying syndrome through training on thousands of patient photographs. However, this “supervised” approach means that diagnoses are only possible if the disorder was part of the training set. To improve recognition of ultra-rare disorders, we created GestaltMatcher, which uses a deep convolutional neural network based on the DeepGestalt framework. We used photographs of 17,560 patients with 1,115 rare disorders to define a “Clinical Face Phenotype Space”. Distance between cases in the phenotype space defines syndromic similarity, allowing test patients to be matched to a molecular diagnosis even when the disorder was not included in the training set. Similarities among patients with previously unknown disease genes can also be detected. Therefore, in concert with mutation data, GestaltMatcher could accelerate the clinical diagnosis of patients with ultra-rare disorders and facial dysmorphism, as well as enable the delineation of novel phenotypes.
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF