AI Now Predicts Your Biological Age And If You’ll Survive Cancer — With A Face Scan
A new artificial intelligence model can measure someone's biological age and predict their chances of surviving cancer just by looking at an image of the person's face, researchers say.
A new artificial intelligence model can measure someone’s biological age and predict their chances of surviving cancer just by looking at an image of the person’s face, researchers say.
Scientists at Mass General Brigham Hospital in Boston built a new AI model that can provide what they’re calling a “non-invasive window into health,” according to a published study released on Oct. 19 in the medical journal The Lancet Digital Health. By simply scanning a selfie, the AI can determine how a person’s cells, tissues and organ systems are functioning as well as his or her likelihood of surviving cancer.
“Facial appearance offers a non-invasive window into health,” the study states. “We built Foundation Artificial Intelligence for Health Recognition-Face (FAHR-Face), a foundation model trained on more than 40 million facial photographs and fine-tuned it for two distinct tasks: biological age estimation (FAHR-FaceAge) and survival prediction (FAHR-FaceSurvival).”
The study’s researchers took these more than 40 million unlabeled photographs from WebFace42M — a dataset comprised of 42 million facial recognition images representing 2 million identities taken from across the internet, according to AI research discovery platform Emergent Mind. A research team from Tsinghua University in Beijing, Imperial College London and China-based XForwardAI developed the dataset in collaboration with each other.
After running these datasets through the FAHR models, researchers fine-tuned the AI on 34,363 photographs of patients with cancer from a research center in the Netherlands to detect signs of mortality risk, the study said. The models “outperformed a previous age estimation model in survival prognostication,” the report found.