The Face of Affective Disorders

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. We name the presented measurement in the sense of the classical scalp based obtrusive sensors Opto Electronic Encephalography (OEG) which relies solely 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 100 patients and 50 controls.