Identification of the Facial Features of Patients With Cancer: A Deep Learning-Based Pilot Study

Cancer has become the second leading cause of death globally. Most cancer cases are due to genetic mutations, which affect metabolism and result in facial changes.

In this study, we aimed to identify the facial features of patients with cancer using the deep learning technique.

Images of faces of patients with cancer were collected to build the cancer face image data set. A face image data set of people without cancer was built by randomly selecting images from the publicly available MegaAge data set according to the sex and age distribution of the cancer face image data set. Each face image was preprocessed to obtain an upright centered face chip, following which the background was filtered out to exclude the effects of nonrelative factors. A residual neural network was constructed to classify cancer and noncancer cases. Transfer learning, minibatches, few epochs, L2 regulation, and random dropout training strategies were used to prevent overfitting. Moreover, guided gradient-weighted class activation mapping was used to reveal the relevant features.

A total of 8124 face images of patients with cancer (men: n=3851, 47.4%; women: n=4273, 52.6%) were collected from January 2018 to January 2019. The ages of the patients ranged from 1 year to 70 years (median age 52 years). The average faces of both male and female patients with cancer displayed more obvious facial adiposity than the average faces of people without cancer, which was supported by a landmark comparison. When testing the data set, the training process was terminated after 5 epochs. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.94, and the accuracy rate was 0.82. The main relative feature of cancer cases was facial skin, while the relative features of noncancer cases were extracted from the complementary face region.

In this study, we built a face data set of patients with cancer and constructed a deep learning model to classify the faces of people with and those without cancer. We found that facial skin and adiposity were closely related to the presence of cancer.