Your Face Might Know More About Your Health Than Your Doctor
If your selfie can outsmart a doctor at predicting your cancer prognosis, should we be treating the mirror as a medical device?
A new AI tool, FaceAge, predicts cancer survival more accurately than some clinicians, by analyzing facial features. Trained on nearly 60,000 healthy face photos, it gauges “biological age,” revealing that cancer patients typically look five years older than they are.
That gap matters: patients with younger FaceAges live longer. In trials, FaceAge boosted doctors’ six-month survival prediction accuracy from 61% to 80%.
- Cancer patients with older FaceAges had poorer outcomes
- Clinicians’ accuracy jumped with FaceAge input
- AI is now testing across broader diseases and age risks
When even your reflection becomes a data point, ethical guardrails are no longer optional—they’re clinical. As AI begins to see what we miss, how should we balance algorithmic insights with human judgement in life-or-death decisions?
Read the full article on Financial Times.
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