A simple selfie could help doctors determine a patient’s “biological age” and judge how well they may respond to cancer treatment, a new study suggests.
Researchers from Mass General Brigham in the US said a patient’s physical appearance may help give insights into their so-called “biological age” – how old a person is physiologically.
Their study found that the new FaceAge AI tool can estimate a person’s biological age, as opposed to their actual age, by scanning an image of their face.
A person’s biological age, which is a predictor of their overall health and can be a predictor of life expectancy, is based on many factors, including lifestyle and genetics, researchers said.
But they wanted to examine whether or not biological age could be examined based on how a person looks – similar to what doctors call an “eyeball test” whereby certain judgments are made based on how a person looks, such as whether or not someone could undergo intensive cancer treatment based on how frail they appear to be.
Researchers said they wanted to see whether they could “go beyond” the “subjective and manual” eyeball test by creating a “deep learning” artificial intelligence (AI) tool which could assess “simple selfies”.
The new algorithm was trained using 59,000 photos.
“Our study now has shown for the first time that we can really use AI to turn a selfie into a real biomarker source of ageing,” said Dr Hugo Aerts, corresponding author of the paper.
He said the tool is low cost, can be used repeatedly over time and could be used to track an individual’s biological age over “months, years and decades”.
“The impact can be very large, because we now have a way to actually very easily monitor a patient’s health status continuously and this could help us to better predict the risk of death or complications after, say, for example, a major surgery or other treatments,” he added.
Explaining the tool, academics showed how it assessed the biological age of actors Paul Rudd and Wilford Brimley based on photographs of the men when they were both 50 years old.
