BOSTON (WHDH) - Researchers at Mass General Brigham are using artificial intelligence (AI) to assess age and predict cancer survival risk with simple facial photographs.
Foundation Artificial Intelligence for Health Recognition (FAHR-Face) is an AI foundation model that can estimate someone’s biological age and survival outcomes in cancer patients.
Doctors say that, as people age, AI models will better help estimate a person’s physical reserve or fragility before recommending treatments like radiation or surgery.
“As the population ages, physicians need better ways to estimate physical reserve and frailty before recommending intensive treatments such as radiation, surgery, or systemic therapy,” said corresponding author Raymond Mak, MD, a radiation oncologist at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute and a faculty member in the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) program at Mass General Brigham. “Our goal is to make face photograph-based health assessment more quantitative, consistent, and scalable so it can support personalized treatment decisions rather than replace physician judgment.”
Mass General Brigham said the AI technology was trained using more than 40 million facial images.
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