AUTHOR=Baynam Gareth , Bauskis Alicia , Pachter Nicholas , Schofield Lyn , Verhoef Hedwig , Palmer Richard L. , Kung Stefanie , Helmholz Petra , Ridout Michael , Walker Caroline E. , Hawkins Anne , Goldblatt Jack , Weeramanthri Tarun S. , Dawkins Hugh J. S. , Molster Caron M. TITLE=3-Dimensional Facial Analysis—Facing Precision Public Health JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health VOLUME=5 YEAR=2017 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2017.00031 DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2017.00031 ISSN=2296-2565 ABSTRACT=

Precision public health is a new field driven by technological advances that enable more precise descriptions and analyses of individuals and population groups, with a view to improving the overall health of populations. This promises to lead to more precise clinical and public health practices, across the continuum of prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment. A phenotype is the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of a genotype with the environment. Precision (deep) phenotyping applies innovative technologies to exhaustively and more precisely examine the discrete components of a phenotype and goes beyond the information usually included in medical charts. This form of phenotyping is a critical component of more precise diagnostic capability and 3-dimensional facial analysis (3DFA) is a key technological enabler in this domain. In this paper, we examine the potential of 3DFA as a public health tool, by viewing it against the 10 essential public health services of the “public health wheel,” developed by the US Centers for Disease Control. This provides an illustrative framework to gage current and emergent applications of genomic technologies for implementing precision public health.