Scientists develop AI tool to predict biological age and cancer survival using just a selfie
It's no secret that people age at different rates, with stress, smoking, genetics, and other factors all making themselves plain on our faces.
Now, a new tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to tell how quickly you're ageing, using only a selfie – not to insult or flatter you, but to assess your health.
For a new study published in The Lancet Digital Health journal, researchers used photos of nearly 59,000 faces to train an AI model to estimate people's biological ages, or their age based on their cellular health rather than their birth date.
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Then they took the model, called "FaceAge," to about 6,200 cancer patients.
On average, cancer patients looked about five years older than their actual ages, and they tended to have higher FaceAge readings than people without cancer, the study found.
Notably, the model also helped doctors make better predictions about the short-term life expectancies of cancer patients receiving palliative care. Only the best physicians' predictions compared to FaceAge alone on accuracy.
"How old someone looks compared to their chronological age really matters," Hugo Aerts, one of the study's authors and director of the AI in medicine programme at Mass General Brigham in the US, said in a statement.
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The researchers said that eventually, the tool could help doctors and cancer patients make decisions about end-of-life care – but that it could also be used to address a host of other health issues.
Dr Ray Mak, one of the study authors and a cancer physician at Mass General Brigham, said FaceAge could someday be used as an "early detection system" for poor health.
"As we increasingly think of different chronic diseases as diseases of ageing, it becomes even more important to be able to accurately predict an individual's ageing trajectory," Mak said in a statement.
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The tool has some limitations. It was primarily trained on white people, and it's not clear how factors that affect people's appearances – like lighting or make-up – could shape the results.
The researchers are now expanding their work to include more hospitals and cancer patients at different stages of the disease, as well as testing FaceAge's accuracy against datasets with plastic surgery and make-up.
Actually seeing a tool like FaceAge used in the doctor's office is a long way away.
But Mak said it "opens the door to a whole new realm of biomarker discovery from photographs".
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