The Deep View: AI for Good. A selfie health assessment. Ireland in the dark ages for health provision but it is never too late to engage with AI and leapfrog.

Posted on May 12, 2025 by michelleclarke2015
🏥 AI for Good: A selfie health assessment
Source: ChatGPT 4o Image Generation
Hospitals already snap a photo of you when you arrive, now FaceAge turns that into new data for doctors. Trained on more than 58,000 “healthy” faces and tested on 6,000 cancer patients, the deep-learning system estimates biological age – how old a body seems, not how many birthdays it’s had. Across three independent cancer cohorts, every extra decade FaceAge estimated in age raised the risk of death 11-15%. In palliative patients, plugging FaceAge into a standard survival model lifted predictive accuracy from 0.74 to 0.80 AUC (Area Under the ROC Curve), roughly the jump clinicians get from a CT scan to a PET scan.
Why it matters: Oncologists often rely on gut feeling to judge whether a patient is healthy enough for chemotherapy. FaceAge brings objectivity to that judgment, turning a patient’s appearance into a quantifiable, clinically useful score.
How it works:
Face Detection: A neural network identifies and processes the face from a standard photograph.Biological Age Estimation: An Inception-ResNet model predicts a patient’s biological age with a 4-year margin of error for seniors.


Clinical Forecasting: The score feeds existing risk tools, boosting accuracy by up to six percentage points.

Genetic Correlation: It also tracks closely with senescence-related genes, suggesting it taps into real molecular aging processes.
Zoom in: Training images lean toward public figures, so broader, representative datasets are essential to curb demographic bias. A prognostic tool that guides therapy must clear rigorous validation and full transparency. Without firm policy, insurers or employers could weaponize “age-in-face” scores; guardrails need to be in place before deployment.
The big picture: FaceAge shows how AI can repurpose everyday data for health – what heart-rate sensors did for watches, facial analytics might do for cameras. If larger trials confirm the findings and equity concerns are addressed, the next time you visit the doctor, biological age may be a standard metric produced as part of your checkup “chronological age: 51; biological (FaceAge): 38”, and treatment plans might shift accordingly.
Unknown's avatar

About michelleclarke2015

Life event that changes all: Horse riding accident in Zimbabwe in 1993, a fractured skull et al including bipolar anxiety, chronic fatigue …. co-morbidities (Nietzche 'He who has the reason why can deal with any how' details my health history from 1993 to date). 17th 2017 August operation for breast cancer (no indications just an appointment came from BreastCheck through the Post). Trinity College Dublin Business Economics and Social Studies (but no degree) 1997-2003; UCD 1997/1998 night classes) essays, projects, writings. Trinity Horizon Programme 1997/98 (Centre for Women Studies Trinity College Dublin/St. Patrick's Foundation (Professor McKeon) EU Horizon funded: research study of 15 women (I was one of this group and it became the cornerstone of my journey to now 2017) over 9 mth period diagnosed with depression and their reintegration into society, with special emphasis on work, arts, further education; Notes from time at Trinity Horizon Project 1997/98; Articles written for Irishhealth.com 2003/2004; St Patricks Foundation monthly lecture notes for a specific period in time; Selection of Poetry including poems written by people I know; Quotations 1998-2017; other writings mainly with theme of social justice under the heading Citizen Journalism Ireland. Letters written to friends about life in Zimbabwe; Family history including Michael Comyn KC, my grandfather, my grandmother's family, the O'Donnellan ffrench Blake-Forsters; Moral wrong: An acrimonious divorce but the real injustice was the Catholic Church granting an annulment – you can read it and make your own judgment, I have mine. Topics I have written about include annual Brain Awareness week, Mashonaland Irish Associataion in Zimbabwe, Suicide (a life sentence to those left behind); Nostalgia: Tara Hill, Co. Meath.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a comment