Latest news with #HugoAerts
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
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. Related Having a poor socioeconomic background could speed up biological ageing, new study finds 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. Related Study on 'fragile' AI predictive models provides 'cautionary tale' about use in medicine 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. Related Is your heart ageing faster than you are? UK scientists develop tool to track its 'functional age' 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".
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
AI tool scans faces to predict biological age and cancer survival
A simple selfie could hold hidden clues to one's biological age — and even how long they'll live. That's according to researchers from Mass General Brigham, who developed a deep-learning algorithm called FaceAge. Using a photo of someone's face, the artificial intelligence tool generates predictions of the subject's biological age, which is the rate at which they are aging as opposed to their chronological age. Music Conductor With Parkinson's Sees Symptoms Improve With Deep Brain Stimulation FaceAge also predicts survival outcomes for people with cancer, according to a press release from MGB. The AI tool was trained on 58,851 photos of "presumed healthy individuals from public datasets," the release stated. Read On The Fox News App To test the tool's accuracy, the researchers used it to analyze photos of 6,196 cancer patients taken before radiotherapy treatment. Among the people with cancer, the tool generated a higher biological age that was about five years higher than their chronological age. Paralyzed Man With Als Is Third To Receive Neuralink Implant, Can Type With Brain The researchers also tested the tool's ability to predict the life expectancy of 100 people receiving palliative care based on their photos, then compared it to 10 clinicians' predictions. FaceAge was found to be more accurate than the clinicians' predictions. The researchers' findings were published in The Lancet Digital Health. "We can use artificial intelligence to estimate a person's biological age from face pictures, and our study shows that information can be clinically meaningful," said co-senior and corresponding author Hugo Aerts, PhD, director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) program at Mass General Brigham, in the release. "This work demonstrates that a photo like a simple selfie contains important information that could help to inform clinical decision-making and care plans for patients and clinicians," he went on. Woman Says Chatgpt Saved Her Life By Helping Detect Cancer, Which Doctors Missed "How old someone looks compared to their chronological age really matters — individuals with FaceAges that are younger than their chronological ages do significantly better after cancer therapy." The goal is for the tool to help eliminate any bias that may influence a doctor's care decisions based on the perception of a patient's appearance and age. The researchers noted that more research is needed before the tool could be rolled out for clinical use. Future studies will include different hospitals and cancer patients at various stages of the disease, according to the release. Researchers will also evaluate FaceAge's ability to predict diseases, general health status and lifespan. "This opens the door to a whole new realm of biomarker discovery from photographs, and its potential goes far beyond cancer care or predicting age," said co-senior author Ray Mak, MD, a faculty member in the AIM program at Mass General Brigham, in the release. "As we increasingly think of different chronic diseases as diseases of aging, it becomes even more important to be able to accurately predict an individual's aging trajectory. I hope we can ultimately use this technology as an early detection system in a variety of applications, within a strong regulatory and ethical framework, to help save lives." Dr. Harvey Castro, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and national speaker on artificial intelligence based in Dallas, Texas, was not involved in FaceAge's development but shared his comments on the tool. Are Full-body Scans Worth The Money? Doctors Share What You Should Know "As an emergency physician and AI futurist, I see both the promise and peril of AI tools like FaceAge," he told Fox News Digital. "What excites me is that FaceAge structures the clinical instinct we call the 'eyeball test' — a gut sense of how sick someone looks. Now, machine learning can quantify that assessment with surprising accuracy." Castro predicts that FaceAge could help doctors better personalize treatment plans or prioritize palliative care in oncology — "where resilience matters more than a birthdate." The doctor emphasized, however, that caution is key. "AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on," Castro noted. "If the training data lacks diversity, we risk producing biased results." "While FaceAge may outperform clinicians in some survival predictions, it should augment human judgment, not override it." Click Here To Sign Up For Our Health Newsletter Castro also cautioned about potential ethical concerns. "Who owns the facial data? How is it stored? Do patients understand what's being analyzed? These questions matter as much as the technology itself," he said. There is also a psychological impact of the tool, Castro noted. "Being told you 'look older' than your age could influence treatment decisions or self-perception in ways we don't yet fully understand," he said. "We need clear consent, data privacy and sensitivity. No one wants to be told they look older without context." For more Health articles, visit The bottom line, according to Castro, is that AI can enhance a doctor's judgment, but cannot replace it. "AI can enhance our care — but it cannot replace the empathy, context and humanity that define medicine."Original article source: AI tool scans faces to predict biological age and cancer survival
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
AI tool scans faces to predict biological age and cancer survival
A simple selfie could hold hidden clues to one's biological age — and even how long they'll live. That's according to researchers from Mass General Brigham, who developed a deep-learning algorithm called FaceAge. Using a photo of someone's face, the artificial intelligence tool generates predictions of the subject's biological age, which is the rate at which they are aging as opposed to their chronological age. Music Conductor With Parkinson's Sees Symptoms Improve With Deep Brain Stimulation FaceAge also predicts survival outcomes for people with cancer, according to a press release from MGB. The AI tool was trained on 58,851 photos of "presumed healthy individuals from public datasets," the release stated. Read On The Fox News App To test the tool's accuracy, the researchers used it to analyze photos of 6,196 cancer patients taken before radiotherapy treatment. Among the people with cancer, the tool generated a higher biological age that was about five years higher than their chronological age. Paralyzed Man With Als Is Third To Receive Neuralink Implant, Can Type With Brain The researchers also tested the tool's ability to predict the life expectancy of 100 people receiving palliative care based on their photos, then compared it to 10 clinicians' predictions. FaceAge was found to be more accurate than the clinicians' predictions. The researchers' findings were published in The Lancet Digital Health. "We can use artificial intelligence to estimate a person's biological age from face pictures, and our study shows that information can be clinically meaningful," said co-senior and corresponding author Hugo Aerts, PhD, director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) program at Mass General Brigham, in the release. "This work demonstrates that a photo like a simple selfie contains important information that could help to inform clinical decision-making and care plans for patients and clinicians," he went on. Woman Says Chatgpt Saved Her Life By Helping Detect Cancer, Which Doctors Missed "How old someone looks compared to their chronological age really matters — individuals with FaceAges that are younger than their chronological ages do significantly better after cancer therapy." The goal is for the tool to help eliminate any bias that may influence a doctor's care decisions based on the perception of a patient's appearance and age. The researchers noted that more research is needed before the tool could be rolled out for clinical use. Future studies will include different hospitals and cancer patients at various stages of the disease, according to the release. Researchers will also evaluate FaceAge's ability to predict diseases, general health status and lifespan. "This opens the door to a whole new realm of biomarker discovery from photographs, and its potential goes far beyond cancer care or predicting age," said co-senior author Ray Mak, MD, a faculty member in the AIM program at Mass General Brigham, in the release. "As we increasingly think of different chronic diseases as diseases of aging, it becomes even more important to be able to accurately predict an individual's aging trajectory. I hope we can ultimately use this technology as an early detection system in a variety of applications, within a strong regulatory and ethical framework, to help save lives." Dr. Harvey Castro, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and national speaker on artificial intelligence based in Dallas, Texas, was not involved in FaceAge's development but shared his comments on the tool. Are Full-body Scans Worth The Money? Doctors Share What You Should Know "As an emergency physician and AI futurist, I see both the promise and peril of AI tools like FaceAge," he told Fox News Digital. "What excites me is that FaceAge structures the clinical instinct we call the 'eyeball test' — a gut sense of how sick someone looks. Now, machine learning can quantify that assessment with surprising accuracy." Castro predicts that FaceAge could help doctors better personalize treatment plans or prioritize palliative care in oncology — "where resilience matters more than a birthdate." The doctor emphasized, however, that caution is key. "AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on," Castro noted. "If the training data lacks diversity, we risk producing biased results." "While FaceAge may outperform clinicians in some survival predictions, it should augment human judgment, not override it." Click Here To Sign Up For Our Health Newsletter Castro also cautioned about potential ethical concerns. "Who owns the facial data? How is it stored? Do patients understand what's being analyzed? These questions matter as much as the technology itself," he said. There is also a psychological impact of the tool, Castro noted. "Being told you 'look older' than your age could influence treatment decisions or self-perception in ways we don't yet fully understand," he said. "We need clear consent, data privacy and sensitivity. No one wants to be told they look older without context." For more Health articles, visit The bottom line, according to Castro, is that AI can enhance a doctor's judgment, but cannot replace it. "AI can enhance our care — but it cannot replace the empathy, context and humanity that define medicine."Original article source: AI tool scans faces to predict biological age and cancer survival
Fox News
12-05-2025
- Health
- Fox News
AI tool scans faces to predict biological age and cancer survival
A simple selfie could hold hidden clues to one's biological age — and even how long they'll live. That's according to researchers from Mass General Brigham, who developed a deep-learning algorithm called FaceAge. Using a photo of someone's face, the artificial intelligence tool generates predictions of the subject's biological age, which is the rate at which they are aging as opposed to their chronological age. FaceAge also predicts survival outcomes for people with cancer, according to a press release from MGB. The AI tool was trained on 58,851 photos of "presumed healthy individuals from public datasets," the release stated. To test the tool's accuracy, the researchers used it to analyze photos of 6,196 cancer patients taken before radiotherapy treatment. Among the people with cancer, the tool generated a higher biological age that was about five years higher than their chronological age. The researchers also tested the tool's ability to predict the life expectancy of 100 people receiving palliative care based on their photos, then compared it to 10 clinicians' predictions. FaceAge was found to be more accurate than the clinicians' predictions. The researchers' findings were published in The Lancet Digital Health. "We can use artificial intelligence to estimate a person's biological age from face pictures, and our study shows that information can be clinically meaningful," said co-senior and corresponding author Hugo Aerts, PhD, director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) program at Mass General Brigham, in the release. "This work demonstrates that a photo like a simple selfie contains important information that could help to inform clinical decision-making and care plans for patients and clinicians," he went on. "How old someone looks compared to their chronological age really matters — individuals with FaceAges that are younger than their chronological ages do significantly better after cancer therapy." The goal is for the tool to help eliminate any bias that may influence a doctor's care decisions based on the perception of a patient's appearance and age. "While FaceAge may outperform clinicians in some survival predictions, it should augment human judgment, not override it." The researchers noted that more research is needed before the tool could be rolled out for clinical use. Future studies will include different hospitals and cancer patients at various stages of the disease, according to the release. Researchers will also evaluate FaceAge's ability to predict diseases, general health status and lifespan. "This opens the door to a whole new realm of biomarker discovery from photographs, and its potential goes far beyond cancer care or predicting age," said co-senior author Ray Mak, MD, a faculty member in the AIM program at Mass General Brigham, in the release. "As we increasingly think of different chronic diseases as diseases of aging, it becomes even more important to be able to accurately predict an individual's aging trajectory. I hope we can ultimately use this technology as an early detection system in a variety of applications, within a strong regulatory and ethical framework, to help save lives." Dr. Harvey Castro, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and national speaker on artificial intelligence based in Dallas, Texas, was not involved in FaceAge's development but shared his comments on the tool. "As an emergency physician and AI futurist, I see both the promise and peril of AI tools like FaceAge," he told Fox News Digital. "What excites me is that FaceAge structures the clinical instinct we call the 'eyeball test' — a gut sense of how sick someone looks. Now, machine learning can quantify that assessment with surprising accuracy." Castro predicts that FaceAge could help doctors better personalize treatment plans or prioritize palliative care in oncology — "where resilience matters more than a birthdate." The doctor emphasized, however, that caution is key. "AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on," Castro noted. "If the training data lacks diversity, we risk producing biased results." "While FaceAge may outperform clinicians in some survival predictions, it should augment human judgment, not override it." Castro also cautioned about potential ethical concerns. "Who owns the facial data? How is it stored? Do patients understand what's being analyzed? These questions matter as much as the technology itself," he said. There is also a psychological impact of the tool, Castro noted. "Being told you 'look older' than your age could influence treatment decisions or self-perception in ways we don't yet fully understand," he said. "We need clear consent, data privacy and sensitivity. No one wants to be told they look older without context." The bottom line, according to Castro, is that AI can enhance a doctor's judgment, but cannot replace it. "AI can enhance our care — but it cannot replace the empathy, context and humanity that define medicine."
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
AI can tell how old your body really is and how quickly you're aging using just a selfie
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A new artificial intelligence (AI) model can predict a person's biological age — the state of their body and how they're aging — from a selfie. The model, dubbed FaceAge, estimates how old a person looks compared to their chronological age, or the amount of time that's passed since their birth. FaceAge's makers say their tool could help doctors decide on the best course of treatment for diseases like cancer. But one outside expert told Live Science that before it is used that way, follow-up data needs to show it actually improves treatment outcomes or quality of life. When a doctor is treating a cancer patient, "one of the first things they do is they try to assess how well the individual is doing," Hugo Aerts, director of the AI in Medicine Program at Mass General Brigham, said in a news briefing on May 7. "This is often a very subjective assessment, but it can influence a lot of future decisions" about their treatment, including how aggressive or intense their treatment plan should be, he added. For example, doctors may decide a patient who looks younger and more fit for their age may tolerate an aggressive treatment better and eventually live longer than a patient who looks older and more frail, even if the two have the same chronological age. FaceAge could make that decision easier by turning doctors' subjective estimates into a quantitative measure, the study authors wrote in the new study published May 8 in the journal Lancet Digital Health. By quantifying biological age, the model could offer another data point in helping doctors decide which treatment to recommend. Aerts and his colleagues trained the model on more than 58,000 photos of people ages 60 years and older who were assumed to be of average health for their age at the time the photo was taken. In this training set, the researchers had the model estimate chronological ages and assumed that the people's biological ages were similar, though the scientists noted that this assumption is not true in every case. The team then used FaceAge to predict the ages of more than 6,000 people with cancer. Cancer patients looked about five years older, on average, than their chronological ages, the team found. FaceAge's estimates also correlated with survival after treatment: The older a person looked, regardless of their chronological age, the lower their chances of living longer. By contrast, chronological age was not a good predictor of survival in cancer patients, the team found. FaceAge isn't ready for hospitals or physicians' offices yet. For one, the dataset used to train the model was pulled from IMDb and Wikipedia — which may not represent the general population, and may also not account for factors like plastic surgery, lifestyle differences, or images that have been digitally retouched. Further studies with larger and more representative training sets are needed to understand how those factors impact FaceAge estimations, the authors said. And the researchers are still improving the algorithm with additional training data and testing its efficacy for other conditions besides cancer. They're also investigating what factors the model draws on to make its predictions. But once it's finalized, FaceAge could, for example, help doctors tailor the intensity of cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy to specific patients, study co-author Dr. Ray Mak, a radiation oncologist at Mass General Brigham, said during the briefing. A clinical trial for cancer patients, comparing FaceAge to more traditional measures of a patient's frailty, is starting soon, Mak added. RELATED STORIES —Sped-up 'biological aging' linked to worse memory —New tool estimates your immune 'age,' predicts risk of disease —Will humans ever be immortal? Ethical guidelines surrounding how FaceAge information can be used, such as whether health insurance or life insurance providers could access FaceAge estimates to make coverage decisions, should be established before rolling out the model, the researchers said. "It is for sure something that needs attention, to assure that these technologies are used only for the benefit of the patient," Aerts said in the briefing. Doctors would also need to carefully consider when and how they use FaceAge in clinical settings, said Nicola White, a palliative care researcher at University College London who was not involved in the study. "When you're dealing with people, it's very different to dealing with statistics," White told Live Science. A long-term study assessing whether involving FaceAge in treatment decisions improved patients' quality of life is needed, she said. The researchers noted the AI tool wouldn't be making calls about treatment on its own. "It's not a replacement for clinician judgement," Mak said. But FaceAge could become part of a physician's toolkit for personalizing a treatment plan, "like having another vital sign data point."
