The post Harvard’s ‘FaceAge’ AI Links Cancer Survival to How Old You Look in a Photo appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

In brief FaceAge is a new AI tool developed at Harvard that estimates biological age based on facial analysis. Trained on nearly 59,000 healthy faces, FaceAge was tested on cancer patients to explore further health risks. Findings showed that patients who looked older than their actual age had worse survival outcomes. A new artificial intelligence model developed at Harvard University, called FaceAge, estimates biological age by analyzing facial features in photos—and might help predict cancer survival by indicating how old a patient appears relative to their actual age. Trained on images of 58,851 healthy people, FaceAge was later tested on cancer patients to explore whether appearing older than one’s chronological age might signal poorer health outcomes. “We found that, on average, cancer patients look older than their chronological age, and looking older is correlated with worse overall survival,” the report said. “FaceAge demonstrated significant independent prognostic performance in a range of cancer types and stages.” Chronological age refers to the number of years a person has been alive, while biological age reflects how well—or poorly—their body is functioning relative to that number. According to Harvard researchers, a person’s physical appearance may provide effective biomarkers to determine their biological age. FaceAge builds on earlier work from ETH Zurich, where researchers created Deep EXpectations (DEX), an open-source deep learning model that estimates apparent age from facial images. The Harvard team also trained FaceAge using images from IMDB-WIKI and UTKFace, two of the largest publicly available facial image datasets. Since 2006, Harvard has committed significant resources to understanding and reversing biological aging. More recently, the university has expanded its investment in AI-driven research focused on diagnosing and treating cancer, fields that are increasingly converging. In October 2024, developers at Harvard Medical School unveiled a new AI model, known as the Clinical Histopathology Imaging…

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Filed under: News - @ May 28, 2025 5:24 am