It turns out your face isn’t just aging, it might also be hinting at how much time you’ve got left. Scientists at Mass General Brigham developed an AI model called FaceAge they claim can look at your face and estimate your “biological age,” or the age of your cells factoring in your experiences, which might significantly differ from the age listed on your driver’s license.
Publishing their findings in Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers are using their AI tool to estimate the biological age of cancer patients and determine their odds of survival, and, more optimistically, to build tailor-made treatment plans.
We’ve reported on the work of Mass General Brigham before. We’ve told you about its nasal sprays that can potentially treat brain injuries and its AI that can predict dementia.
Now, the researchers have trained an AI on 59,000 public portraits from places like IMDB and Wikipedia. They then fed it images of about 6,200 cancer patients. The results were…unsettling. Cancer patients the AI model believed to be younger tended to have better outcomes. Meanwhile, it predicted those who looked older were goners.
The tool doesn’t just scan for the usual signs of aging, like crow’s feet or receding hairlines. It reads signs, like facial muscle tone and the hollowing of temples, which reflect the loss of muscle mass. Impressive and creepy all at the same time.
As gloomy as it is that there’s an AI that spits out a rough estimate of how much longer you’ve got before you’re taken by cancer, there is an upside. FaceAge might one day help doctors personalize treatments. If you’re 75 but your biological age is closer to a young, healthy forty-something, you might be able to handle aggressive therapies. But if you’re biologically 90 at 75, maybe making you comfortable in your final days is a higher priority.
No discussion of computers trying to analyze people’s biometrics is complete without a small dose of bias and racism. The AI was trained mostly on white faces, which raises all the usual justified concerns about racial bias. Plus, the model might get tripped up by makeup, cosmetic surgery, or even a good Instagram filter. If you’re lit with a ring light and sporting the snatched contouring of a drag queen, this AI might think you’re immortal.
And then, of course, there is the nightmare scenario: What if insurance companies start using this tech to say, sorry, they can’t help you because you look like you’re going to die soon? It’s sad that we can accurately predict the exact horrific ways financially motivated healthcare companies will use every new diagnostic tool at their disposal to screw you.
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