Back To The Future test finds brain disease 10 years early
Teenager’s medical breakthrough is inspired by Michael J. Fox picture
HE IS the star of the Back To The Future films who was told he had Parkinson’s disease aged just 29.
Now actor Michael J. Fox has inspired a brilliant teenager – a huge fan of the movies – to invent a way to spot the condition ten years earlier than is usually the case.
Erin Smith was 15 when she had her ‘eureka’ moment while watching footage of the actor.
She saw how, as a result of the neurological disease, Fox’s facial expressions lacked emotion even when he was enthused. Like other sufferers, he also had a droopy smile and upturned eyebrow.
Looking back through Fox’s work, Erin saw how his expressions started to change even before he was diagnosed in 1991 – six years after the first film in the series.
Keen to devise a computer programme to spot people with early signs of the disease, Erin learned how to code from scratch. Within a year she had created a prototype that could identify telltale clues using video footage.
Similar facial recognition technology is used to scan CCTV images for faces of known criminals, but Erin’s programme had a ‘machine learning’ capacity to get continually better at spotting the signs of Parkinson’s.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation, which backs research to find a cure, funded two pilot studies, which concluded Erin’s FacePrint programme was 88 per cent accurate at distinguishing Parkinson’s sufferers from healthy people.
Ms Smith, now 19, outlined FacePrint during a Dragons’ Den-style pitch at a conference in London last week run by tech magazine Wired.
She said: ‘After having the initial idea, I was able to look at old footage to see when Michael’s facial differences occurred. And as I searched through past medical papers, I found that the parts of the brain that experience the earliest changes in Parkinson’s are the same parts involved in facial expression formation.’
Major signs such as tremor and difficulty walking do not occur until up to 20 years after onset.
Sufferers include Glasgow-born comedy legend Sir Billy Connolly, who was diagnosed in 2013.
Ms Smith, from Kansas, is now planning a ‘crowdsourcing’ trial to refine the programme. It is backed by Stanford University, where she has won a place to study computer science and neuroscience.
Professor David Dexter, of the charity Parkinson’s UK, said: ‘Earlier detection would not only enable people to take control, but could lead to the development of new and better treatments.’