This AI Tool Can Estimate Your Biological Age From Just One Photo
Scientists have developed an AI tool that can look at an ordinary photograph and estimate how fast a body is aging — an insight that could change the nature of cancer care.
According to a new study in The Lancet Digital Health, researchers at Mass General Brigham have developed an AI tool that estimates the biological age of adults with cancer by analyzing facial photographs.
The AI tool called FaceAge was designed to help evaluate a patient’s overall health by providing a biological age — a more accurate reflection of how their body is aging, which could be useful in guiding treatment decisions.
To create FaceAge, the researchers trained it using nearly 60,000 images of healthy people, then tested its accuracy on over 6,000 cancer patients about to begin radiotherapy. They discovered that, on average, cancer patients looked about five years older biologically than their actual age, and each extra year of biological aging was linked to a shorter life expectancy.
FaceAge works by automatically scanning facial features — such as skin quality, muscle tone, and eye structure — and then working out a person’s biological age. All it needs is a head-and-shoulders photo to make its prediction.
The study suggests that biological age could be a strong indicator of a patient’s physical condition and resilience, potentially offering doctors a more effective way to assess how someone might respond to certain treatments compared to using chronological age alone.
The scientists behind the study say that more research is necessary before this technology can be used in real clinical settings. They’re currently exploring its potential to predict disease risk, overall health, and even lifespan. Upcoming studies will focus on testing the tool in multiple hospitals, evaluating patients at various stages of cancer, monitoring how FaceAge scores change over time, and checking how well it performs with altered appearances in photographs, such as after plastic surgery or when makeup is applied.
“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,” Ray Mak a faculty member in the AIM program at Mass General Brigham says in a press 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.”
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
