What Your Face Age’ Reveals About Health

Cancer doctor Raymond Mak had a hunch that an elderly patient was healthy enough to withstand aggressive treatment.

- ALEX JANIN

A photo of the man's face helped affirm his intuition.

Mak ran the photo through a "face age" test, which showed that the 90-year-old man's health was more similar to someone in their late 60s.

The FaceAge test is an artificial intelligence model trained on tens of thousands of photos from patients and public-image databases to look for signs of aging in the face.

Mak and his team ran a study that found that the algorithm did a better job than doctors at predicting how long cancer patients would live.

Their hope is that one day, the tool could be a standard part of assessing health. Already, separate versions of face-age tests exist online where anybody can upload a selfie and get an estimate of their biological age.

"Your face reflects the wear and tear of your lifetime," says Mak, a radiation oncologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, who co-led the study alongside other Mass General Brigham researchers. "We viewed this as a way to quantify a doctor's clinical intuition." Please.

AI is crossing the line from novelty into tangible patient care throughout medicine, helping doctors make decisions more often.

Rapid analysis of chest Xrays is helping to detect Covid-19, for instance, while researchers are experimenting with models to identify Parkinson's and autism from face photos and videos. These applications offer the promise of better, more efficient care but also raise concerns including over privacy and legal liability for doctors and patients if the technology gets it wrong.

'A younger person'

Oncologists often use their perceptions of patients' health to help evaluate treatment options.