Persistent prosopagnosia following COVID-19.

COVID-19 can cause psychological problems including loss of smell and taste, long-lasting memory, speech, and language impairments, and psychosis. Here, we provide the first report of prosopagnosia following symptoms consistent with COVID-19. Annie is a 28-year-old woman who had normal face recognition prior to contracting COVID-19 in March 2020. Two months later, she noticed face recognition difficulties while experiencing symptom relapses and her deficits with faces have persisted. On two tests of familiar face recognition and two tests of unfamiliar face recognition, Annie showed clear impairments. In contrast, she scored normally on tests assessing face detection, face identity perception, object recognition, scene recognition, and non-visual memory. Navigational deficits frequently co-occur with prosopagnosia, and Annie reports that her navigational abilities are substantially worse than before she became ill. Self-report survey data from 54 respondents with long COVID showed that a majority reported reductions in visual recognition and navigation abilities. In summary, Annie's results indicate that COVID-19 can produce severe and selective neuropsychological impairments similar to deficits seen following brain damage, and it appears that high-level visual impairments are not uncommon in people with long COVID.

[COVID-induced facial bones necrosis]. / COVID-indutsirovannyi nekroz chelyustnykh kostei.

The article focuses on the clinical manifestation of inflammatory and destructive lesions of the bones of the midface, nose and paranasal sinuses as a long-term complication of COVID-19 with clinical examples provided.

Facial fat necrosis after autologous fat transfer possibly associated with SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

A 52-year-old female patient developed facial fat necrosis presenting with cutaneous induration three weeks after minimal access cranial suspension (MACS) lift with autologous fat grafting from the abdomen. Given that the patient received the Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccine one week after surgery, we hypothesize that the former predisposed her to tissue ischemia leading to fat necrosis. Histological findings after biopsy were consistent with fat necrosis, which included marked dermal fibrosis with areas of focal fat necrosis, lipophages, multinucleated giant cells, and siderophages. It is our hope that documenting this rare development in literature may serve as encouragement for adverse effect reporting after the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine administration and may boost inspection and monitoring of other health consequences by regulating agencies.

Adaptive Spatial Transformation Networks for Periocular Recognition.

Periocular recognition has emerged as a particularly valuable biometric identification method in challenging scenarios, such as partially occluded faces due to COVID-19 protective masks masks, in which face recognition might not be applicable. This work presents a periocular recognition framework based on deep learning, which automatically localises and analyses the most important areas in the periocular region. The main idea is to derive several parallel local branches from a neural network architecture, which in a semi-supervised manner learn the most discriminative areas in the feature map and solve the identification problem solely upon the corresponding cues. Here, each local branch learns a transformation matrix that allows for basic geometrical transformations (cropping and scaling), which is used to select a region of interest in the feature map, further analysed by a set of shared convolutional layers. Finally, the information extracted by the local branches and the main global branch are fused together for recognition. The experiments carried out on the challenging UBIRIS-v2 benchmark show that by integrating the proposed framework with various ResNet architectures, we consistently obtain an improvement in mAP of more than 4% over the "vanilla" architecture. In addition, extensive ablation studies were performed to better understand the behavior of the network and how the spatial transformation and the local branches influence the overall performance of the model. The proposed method can be easily adapted to other computer vision problems, which is also regarded as one of its strengths.

Multiple branch retinal artery occlusions following the new facial cosmetic filler (Poly-D, L-lactic Acid) injection a case report.

BACKGROUND: Poly-D, L-lactic acid is (PDLLA) a new cosmetic filler. We reported the first case of PDLLA-related devastating complication of multiple branch retinal artery occlusion (BRAO). CASE PRESENTATION: A 23-year-old female had sudden blindness after injection of PDLLA at the glabella. After emergency intraocular pressure-lowering medicine, ocular massage, steroid pulse therapy, heparin and alprostadil infusion, and subsequent treatments including acupuncture and 40 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, her best-corrected visual acuity improved from hand motion at 30 cm to 0.3 within 2 months. CONCLUSION: Although safety of PDLLA was evaluated in animal studies and in 16,000 human cases, it could still cause rare but devastating retinal artery occlusion as in the present case. Proper and immediate therapies could still improve patient's vision and scotoma. Surgeons should keep in mind the possibility of iatrogenic filler-related retinal artery occlusion.

A global analysis of the effectiveness of policy responses to COVID-19.

Governments implemented many non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to suppress the spread of COVID-19 with varying results. In this paper, country-level daily time series from Our World in Data facilitates a global analysis of the propagation of the virus, policy responses and human mobility patterns. High death counts and mortality ratios influence policy compliance levels. Evidence of long-term fatigue was found with compliance dropping from over 85% in the first half of 2020 to less than 40% at the start of 2021, driven by factors such as economic necessity and optimism coinciding with vaccine effectiveness. NPIs ranged from facial coverings to restrictions on mobility, and these are compared using an empirical assessment of their impact on the growth rate of case numbers. Masks are the most cost-effective NPI currently available, delivering four times more impact than school closures, and approximately double that of other mobility restrictions. Gathering restrictions were the second most effective. International travel controls and public information campaigns had negligible effects. Literacy rates and income support played key roles in maintaining compliance. A 10% increase in literacy rate was associated with a 3.2% increase in compliance, while income support of greater than half of previous earnings increased compliance by 4.8%.

Long-term outcomes of transcutaneous retrobulbar amphotericin B in COVID-19-associated mucormycosis.

Purpose: To describe the long-term outcomes of transcutaneous retrobulbar amphotericin B (TRAMB) in COVID-19-associated mucormycosis. Methods: In total, 18 cases of COVID-19-associated mucormycosis were reviewed. In addition to the recommended treatment protocol, all patients were to be given 3.5 mg/ml/day of TRAMB for five days. Results: Of the 18 patients, 2 presented with stage 3a disease, 13 had stage 3c disease, and 3 patients had central nervous system (CNS) involvement (stage 4a and 4c). In addition to planned retrobulbar doses, five patients were given more while two patients received fewer injections (i.e., <5). At the last mean follow-up of 34.67 (±8.88) weeks, 11 patients were in radiological regression and 4 had stable disease while 2 patients had to undergo exenteration; one mortality was observed because of disease progression. Clinical regression in terms of visual and ptosis improvement was seen in seven and nine patients, respectively. Conclusion: Rhino-orbito-cerebral mucormycosis is a serious condition which warrants an aggressive treatment strategy. In unprecedented situations witnessed recently, TRAMB turned out to be an effective and economical alternative. Though large randomized studies are needed to establish its efficacy, TRAMB still manages to halt progression and salvage the globe in significant number of patients, and hence its use should be encouraged on a case-to-case basis especially in developing countries with limited resources.

Development of Real-Time Landmark-Based Emotion Recognition CNN for Masked Faces.

Owing to the availability of a wide range of emotion recognition applications in our lives, such as for mental status calculation, the demand for high-performance emotion recognition approaches remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the wearing of facial masks has been indispensable during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we propose a graph-based emotion recognition method that adopts landmarks on the upper part of the face. Based on the proposed approach, several pre-processing steps were applied. After pre-processing, facial expression features need to be extracted from facial key points. The main steps of emotion recognition on masked faces include face detection by using Haar-Cascade, landmark implementation through a media-pipe face mesh model, and model training on seven emotional classes. The FER-2013 dataset was used for model training. An emotion detection model was developed for non-masked faces. Thereafter, landmarks were applied to the upper part of the face. After the detection of faces and landmark locations were extracted, we captured coordinates of emotional class landmarks and exported to a comma-separated values (csv) file. After that, model weights were transferred to the emotional classes. Finally, a landmark-based emotion recognition model for the upper facial parts was tested both on images and in real time using a web camera application. The results showed that the proposed model achieved an overall accuracy of 91.2% for seven emotional classes in the case of an image application. Image based emotion detection of the proposed model accuracy showed relatively higher results than the real-time emotion detection.

Facial Appearance Dissatisfaction Explains Differences in Zoom Fatigue.

Viewing self-video during videoconferences potentially causes negative self-focused attention that contributes to virtual meeting (VM) or "Zoom" fatigue. The present research examines this proposition, focusing on facial dissatisfaction-feeling unhappy about one's own facial appearance-as a potential psychological mechanism of VM fatigue. A study of survey responses from a panel of 613 adults found that VM fatigue was 14.9 percent higher for women than for men, and 11.1 percent higher for Asian than for White participants. These gender and race/ethnicity differences were found to be mediated by facial dissatisfaction. This study replicates earlier VM fatigue research, extends the theoretical understanding of facial dissatisfaction as a psychological mechanism of VM fatigue, and suggests that practical approaches to mitigating VM fatigue could include implementing technological features that reduce self-focused attention during VMs (e.g., employing avatars).

Hand-to-Face Contact of Preschoolers during Indoor Activities in Childcare Facilities in the Republic of Korea.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to characterize hand-to-face contact (HFC) in children and analyze the factors that affect HFC behaviors of preschoolers in childcare facilities in Korea. METHODS: Thirty preschoolers aged between 13 and 84 months were enrolled with parents' voluntary participation. Videotaping (10 children/childcare center/2 h) and video reading was performed from 23 November 2018 to 7 January 2019. RESULTS: A total of 2719 cases of HFC were observed in 30 participants within 2 h. The average contact with the facial mucosa (frequency/person/2 h) was 55.6 ± 42.2, of which the mouth (25.4 ± 23.9), the nose (20.4 ± 24.5), and the eye (9.8 ± 11.7) were the most frequent contacts, in that order. The average contact duration (sec/person/2 h) with the facial mucosa was 232.6 ± 169.7, of which the mouth (145.2 ± 150), the nose (57.6 ± 62.2), and the eyes (29.7 ± 42.3) were the longest in that order. The density distribution of the frequency and duration of mucosal contact was wider in boys than in girls. The mucosal and non-mucosal contact frequencies were significantly higher in boys (p = 0.027 and p = 0.030, respectively). CONCLUSION: Children's HFC frequency and duration were highest for the mouth, nose, and eyes. Boys tended to have a higher contact frequency than girls for both mucous and non-mucous HFC.

Developing a voluntary initiative for homeless populations in general dental practice.

The number of people experiencing homelessness is increasing in the UK and their access to general dental services is particularly challenging. This is often due to the numerous barriers that homeless populations face in accessing dental services. In this article, we provide information about a voluntary dental initiative that was set up in 2020 to cater to the needs of homeless populations. We give details of how this initiative started, reasons for attendance and services provided, collaborations, financial considerations and ways in which additional support is provided to patients. We end this article by outlining our key learning points, positive impacts of the initiative and a conclusion/summary of future plans.

Psychological Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Facial Feminization Surgery Patients.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted mental health among the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer community, with the delay of medical services as a factor. The pandemic's psychological effect on the transfeminine community pursuing facial feminization surgery remains unstudied. METHODS: Patients at our institution whose facial feminization surgeries were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic were included. A chart review collected validated, self-reported depression and psychological distress measures, as well as perceived facial femininity and desire for feminizing facial surgery prior to the pandemic. The data were compared to repeat measures during the pandemic (March-April 2020). RESULTS: Thirty patients were included in the study, 11 of whom had repeat data. Respondents during the pandemic (compared to prepandemic) felt their face was more feminine (p = 0.026) and more likely to be perceived as feminine by others (p = 0.026). They indicated a lower desire to alter their appearance with surgery (p = 0.041). Depression and distress indices were greater during the pandemic (p = 0.0018 and p = 0.026, respectively). CONCLUSION: This study is consistent with increasing depression and psychological distress among transfeminine individuals pursuing facial feminization surgery during the pandemic. The study revealed greater perceived facial femininity and a lower desire for surgery during the pandemic.

That person is now with or without a mask: how encoding context modulates identity recognition.

Previous research has mostly approached face recognition and target identification by focusing on face perception mechanisms, but memory mechanisms also appear to play a role. Here, we examined how the presence of a mask interferes with the memory mechanisms involved in face recognition, focusing on the dynamic interplay between encoding and recognition processes. We approach two known memory effects: (a) matching study and test conditions effects (i.e., by presenting masked and/or unmasked faces) and (b) testing expectation effects (i.e., knowing in advance that a mask could be put on or taken off). Across three experiments using a yes/no recognition paradigm, the presence of a mask was orthogonally manipulated at the study and the test phases. All data showed no evidence of matching effects. In Experiment 1, the presence of masks either at study or test impaired the correct identification of a target. But in Experiments 2 and 3, in which the presence of masks at study or test was manipulated within participants, only masks presented at test-only impaired face identification. In these conditions, test expectations led participants to use similar encoding strategies to process masked and unmasked faces. Across all studies, participants were more liberal (i.e., used a more lenient criterion) when identifying masked faces presented at the test. We discuss these results and propose that to better understand how people may identify a face wearing a mask, researchers should take into account that memory is an active process of discrimination, in which expectations regarding test conditions may induce an encoding strategy that enables overcoming perceptual deficits.

Heart Rate Measurement Based on 3D Central Difference Convolution with Attention Mechanism.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a video-based non-contact heart rate measurement technology. It is a fact that most existing rPPG methods fail to deal with the spatiotemporal features of the video, which is significant for the extraction of the rPPG signal. In this paper, we propose a 3D central difference convolutional network (CDCA-rPPGNet) to measure heart rate, with an attention mechanism to combine spatial and temporal features. First, we crop and stitch the region of interest together through facial landmarks. Next, the high-quality regions of interest are fed to CDCA-rPPGNet based on a central difference convolution, which can enhance the spatiotemporal representation and capture rich relevant time contexts by collecting time difference information. In addition, we integrate the attention module into the neural network, aiming to strengthen the ability of the neural network to extract video channels and spatial features, so as to obtain more accurate rPPG signals. In summary, the three main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) the proposed network base on central difference convolution could better capture the subtle color changes to recover the rPPG signals; (2) the proposed ROI extraction method provides high-quality input to the network; (3) the attention module is used to strengthen the ability of the network to extract features. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public datasets-the PURE dataset and the UBFC-rPPG dataset. In terms of the experiment results, our proposed method achieves 0.46 MAE (bpm), 0.90 RMSE (bpm) and 0.99 R value of Pearson's correlation coefficient on the PURE dataset, and 0.60 MAE (bpm), 1.38 RMSE (bpm) and 0.99 R value of Pearson's correlation coefficient on the UBFC dataset, which proves the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Spatiotemporal droplet dispersion measurements demonstrate face masks reduce risks from singing.

COVID-19 has restricted singing in communal worship. We sought to understand variations in droplet transmission and the impact of wearing face masks. Using rapid laser planar imaging, we measured droplets while participants exhaled, said 'hello' or 'snake', sang a note or 'Happy Birthday', with and without surgical face masks. We measured mean velocity magnitude (MVM), time averaged droplet number (TADN) and maximum droplet number (MDN). Multilevel regression models were used. In 20 participants, sound intensity was 71 dB for speaking and 85 dB for singing (p < 0.001). MVM was similar for all tasks with no clear hierarchy between vocal tasks or people and > 85% reduction wearing face masks. Droplet transmission varied widely, particularly for singing. Masks decreased TADN by 99% (p < 0.001) and MDN by 98% (p < 0.001) for singing and 86-97% for other tasks. Masks reduced variance by up to 48%. When wearing a mask, neither singing task transmitted more droplets than exhaling. In conclusion, wide variation exists for droplet production. This significantly reduced when wearing face masks. Singing during religious worship wearing a face mask appears as safe as exhaling or talking. This has implications for UK public health guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A systematic review of facial plastic surgery simulation training models.

OBJECTIVES: The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has led to a need for alternative teaching methods in facial plastics. This systematic review aimed to identify facial plastics simulation models, and assess their validity and efficacy as training tools. METHODS: Literature searches were performed. The Beckman scale was used for validity. The McGaghie Modified Translational Outcomes of Simulation-Based Mastery Learning score was used to evaluate effectiveness. RESULTS: Overall, 29 studies were selected. These simulated local skin flaps (n = 9), microtia frameworks (n = 5), pinnaplasty (n = 1), facial nerve anastomosis (n = 1), oculoplastic procedures (n = 5), and endoscopic septoplasty and septorhinoplasty simulators (n = 10). Of these models, 14 were deemed to be high-fidelity, 13 low-fidelity and 2 mixed-fidelity. None of the studies published common outcome measures. CONCLUSION: Simulators in facial plastic surgical training are important. These models may have some training benefits, but most could benefit from further assessment of validity.