Facial Foundational Model Advances Early Warning of Coronary Artery Disease from Live Videos with DigitalShadow

Global population aging presents increasing challenges to healthcare systems, with coronary artery disease (CAD) responsible for approximately 17.8 million deaths annually, making it a leading cause of global mortality. As CAD is largely preventable, early detection and proactive management are essential. In this work, we introduce DigitalShadow, an advanced early warning system for CAD, powered by a fine-tuned facial foundation model. The system is pre-trained on 21 million facial images and subsequently fine-tuned into LiveCAD, a specialized CAD risk assessment model trained on 7,004 facial images from 1,751 subjects across four hospitals in China. DigitalShadow functions passively and contactlessly, extracting facial features from live video streams without requiring active user engagement. Integrated with a personalized database, it generates natural language risk reports and individualized health recommendations. With privacy as a core design principle, DigitalShadow supports local deployment to ensure secure handling of user data.

@article{zhou2025_2506.06283,
  title={ Facial Foundational Model Advances Early Warning of Coronary Artery Disease from Live Videos with DigitalShadow },
  author={ Juexiao Zhou and Zhongyi Han and Mankun Xin and Xingwei He and Guotao Wang and Jiaoyan Song and Gongning Luo and Wenjia He and Xintong Li and Yuetan Chu and Juanwen Chen and Bo Wang and Xia Wu and Wenwen Duan and Zhixia Guo and Liyan Bai and Yilin Pan and Xuefei Bi and Lu Liu and Long Feng and Xiaonan He and Xin Gao },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.06283},
  year={ 2025 }
}