Mass General Brigham Opens FaceAge to Public, Launchs 2 Clinical Trials
Updated
Updated · The Boston Globe · Oct 20
Mass General Brigham Opens FaceAge to Public, Launchs 2 Clinical Trials
3 articles · Updated · The Boston Globe · Oct 20
Summary
More than 10,000 people have enrolled since March in Mass General Brigham’s newly public FaceAge study, which lets users upload 3 to 10 selfies and receive a biological-age estimate in seconds.
The release comes with a Lancet Digital Health validation study showing that, among 38,000 Harvard patients, people who looked at least five years older than their actual age had a 21% higher risk of death.
Two new trials are now testing whether the tool can guide care: one enrolls 60 lung-cancer patients aged 65 and older before radiation, while another pairs FaceAge with wearable data to flag surgical-complication risk.
Researchers said the system is for research rather than diagnosis, and outside experts noted its survival signal varied across cancer types, showing significant associations in 18 of 28 categories.
Trained on more than 40 million face images, the model is also being used to study how habits such as smoking, alcohol use and drug use shape biological aging as the database expands.