A new AI tool promises to give doctors a clearer picture of a patient’s health by analysing their face.
Known as FaceAge, it is modelled after what physicians call “the eyeball test,” a quick visual assessment made by doctors to gauge a patient’s overall condition at a glance.
FaceAge is essentially powered by a deep learning algorithm that has been trained and developed to tell patients’ biological age from a selfie.
The developers of the AI tool have said that they expect to conduct a pilot study with about 50 patients starting next week.
This means that FaceAge is yet to undergo proper testing before it can be deployed in hospitals to be used by doctors routinely.
Mass General Brigham researchers said that FaceAge’s training datasets comprised 9,000 photographs of people ages 60 and older who were presumed to be healthy.
A majority of the photos were downloaded from Wikipedia and IMDb, the internet movie database.
The AI system was also trained using a large-scale dataset sourced from UTKFace, which comprised pictures of people between one year to 116 years old.