Comparing methods for assessment of facial dynamics in patients with major neurocognitive disorders

Abstract

Assessing facial dynamics in patients with major neurocognitive disorders and specifically with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has shown to be highly challenging. Classically such assessment is performed by clinical staff, evaluating verbal and non-verbal language of AD-patients, since they have lost a substantial amount of their cognitive capacity, and hence communication ability. In addition, patients need to communicate important messages, such as discomfort or pain. Automated methods would support the current healthcare system by allowing for telemedicine, i.e., lesser costly and logistically inconvenient examination. In this work we compare methods for assessing facial dynamics such as talking, singing, neutral and smiling in AD-patients, captured during music mnemotherapy sessions. Specifically, we compare 3D ConvNets, Very Deep Neural Network based Two-Stream ConvNets, as well as Improved Dense Trajectories. We have adapted these methods from prominent action recognition methods and our promising results suggest that the methods generalize well to the context of facial dynamics. The Two-Stream ConvNets in combination with ResNet-152 obtains the best performance on our dataset, capturing well even minor facial dynamics and has thus sparked high interest in the medical community.