# Toward an Automatic System for Computer-Aided Assessment in Facial Palsy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Unobtrusive Pain Monitoring in Older Adults with Dementia using Pairwise and Contrastive Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03251/) (2021)
- [SynPAIN: A Synthetic Dataset of Pain and Non-Pain Facial Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19673/) (2025)
- [A store-and-forward cloud-based telemonitoring system for automatic assessing dysarthria evolution in neurological diseases from video-recording analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09038/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Importance: Machine learning (ML) approaches to facial landmark localization carry great clinical potential for quantitative assessment of facial function as they enable high-throughput automated quantification of relevant facial metrics from photographs. However, translation from research settings to clinical applications requires important improvements. Objective: To develop an ML algorithm for accurate facial landmarks localization in photographs of facial palsy patients, and use it as part of an automated computer-aided diagnosis system. Design, Setting, and Participants: Facial landmarks were manually localized in portrait photographs of eight expressions obtained from 200 facial palsy patients and 10 controls. A novel ML model for automated facial landmark localization was trained using this disease-specific database. Model output was compared to manual annotations and the output of a model trained using a larger database consisting only of healthy subjects. Model accuracy was evaluated by the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) between algorithms' prediction and manual annotations. Results: Publicly available algorithms provide poor results when applied to patients compared to healthy controls (NRMSE, 8.56 +/- 2.16 vs. 7.09 +/- 2.34, p << 0.01). We found significant improvement in facial landmark localization accuracy for the clinical population when using a model trained with a relatively small number patients' photographs (1440) compared to a model trained using several thousand more images of healthy faces (NRMSE, 6.03 +/- 2.43 vs. 8.56 +/- 2.16, p << 0.01). Conclusions: Retraining a landmark detection model with a small number of clinical images significantly improved landmark detection performance in frontal view photographs of the clinical population. These results represent the first steps towards an automatic system for computer-aided assessment in facial palsy.