Find Out How This Technology Takes People's Facial Pictures Without Seeing Them

Hello my friends the world over; I know I have been unbearably absent (for almost six months now) and I'm truly sorry for that, though the reason was beyond my control (I have been preoccupied with attending to my foremost duties, encompassed in Med School). However, I'm back here for you, though I can't promise to be regular because I don't make promises and fail to keep them. To begin with my resumption, do you think it's possible to create a 3-D image of your face without seeing you (to either draw you or take a shot with my camera)? Well, it could have been described as magic in the 1980s, but the capability of our human mind is limitless and its manifestation in science and technology pushes boundaries further every day, and below is just a demonstration of that boundary pushing. Enjoy

I read the story of a man in the US who was charged with rape and murder, and jailed for over 35 years back in the early 1980s, but by 2011 he was released from prison after concrete evidence emerged that he didn’t commit the crime and that the real offender was finally apprehended after matching the DNA samples collected from the crime scene back in the 80s. I was furious after reading the story and wondered what limitations in the investigation could have led to wasting 30 precious years of an innocent man’s life. But it happened that after running the DNA samples obtained at the crime scene  through the FBI crime databases containing DNA and fingerprints of convicts and previously arrested suspects, and after comparing with DNA samples of suspects arrested after the crime, there was no single match because the culprit was a first time offender who went on the run; and this man who ranked higher among the arrested suspects ended up in jail: and I’m sure many people are serving jail term out of similar situations.

Snapshot. Image credit to Parabon NanoLabs

This was a very helpless situation for the man; but such state of helplessness could become a thing of the past, like the time period called 1980s, with the work of a company called Parabon NanoLabs in Columbia, US because it shares my concerns for such terrible setbacks to forensic crime investigations. By leveraging the unlimited potentials of the Human Genome Project and harnessing the power of modern genomic sequencing, scientists and tech experts at Parabon NanoLabs have developed a technology they call Snapshot that can construct a 3-D facial image of any person with DNA samples from them. Let’s say it’s a tech form of genotype to phenotype translation we’ve been taught in Biology, Physiology and so on. But Snapshot creates these facial images by scanning and interpreting genotype data sets (several groups of unique DNA sequences called short nucleotide polymorphisms), input into it from any genome, which are very strongly linked to phenotype data sets such as pigmentation (eye, hair and skin

colours); the shape of your nose and mouth, and other facial morphological features; presence of skin spots; ancestry and other features that distinguish one person from another.

To further strengthen the reliability of this technology, DNA samples from convicted criminals have been used construct their facial images from Snapshot and then compared with their photographed images, with greater than 80% accuracy in features like pigmentation and ancestry; features like presence of skin spots scored below 50% due to inclusion of DNA sequences that express more than one feature, and the guys at Parabon are working to eliminate this ambiguous sequences and scale down to only ones that are unique to specific features in very closely related people like those from the same family.

In addition, I did watch a few episodes of Criminal Minds, a TV series where FBI Behaviour Analysts create psychosocial profiles of suspects from the patterns and nature of crimes at crime scenes; even if a bit of this is done in real life, it’s still based on the database of arrested suspects and convicts whose psychosocial statuses have been profiled and whose crimes are well documented. But what happens when a serial killer, who has never been suspected and arrested before, doubles as a very smart chess player and commits his crimes based on moves (I learnt there are millions, if not billions, of possibilities for the first four moves on chess)? Definitely, Criminal Minds will remain behind TV screens unless investigation agencies have the time, resources and manpower to bring over a million Behaviour Analysts to such crime scenes. However, with this novel technology called Snapshot, such suspects can’t play chess with their DNA sequences; and if it is combined with Criminal Mind-like investigations, crime investigators will certainly make definitive criminal diagnosis for almost every case so that innocent people, like the US man I read about, wouldn’t have their life years taken from them. 

Finally, this Snapshot technology seems to fundamentally focus on the crime investigations sector; but I think so many other sectors can benefit immensely from this technology. Feel free to exercise your imaginative rights and comment on further present and future applications of the technology. Thank you.

I wrote this piece primarily for the June edition of Klatsch Magazine run by Just4meds, a social media site for people in the medical profession--from medical students and students in other allied medical fields to consultants in these medical fields--to interact with each other anywhere in the world. Just4meds was founded and is run by a classmate of mine at the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan and the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria.