Selfies and Your Health: A Look into the Future
CINCINNATI (WKRC) – Could the photos we casually take on our phones hold the key to understanding our health? A recent study indicates that selfies combined with artificial intelligence (AI) might soon play a significant role in guiding medical care.
This technology analyzes face age, potentially revealing how well you’ll respond to medical treatment.
This innovative approach focuses on analyzing a person’s “face age,” which could offer insights into their overall well-being.
Amber Mehle, an enthusiastic selfie taker, shared her thoughts: “For sure, I’ve been really into that now and doing more videos and fun things like that.”
Dr. Jon Mendelsohn, a facial plastic surgeon at the Advanced Cosmetic Surgery and Laser Center, explained the science behind this concept. “We lose volume in the temples, under the eyes, and in the eye hollows,” Mendelsohn stated. “We’ll start to see some hooding with volume loss, and skin damage shows up.”
AI’s Role in Predicting Health Outcomes
The study used AI to analyze approximately 60,000 faces, comparing them to data from around 5,000 to 6,000 cancer patients. This allowed researchers to identify patterns and potential correlations between facial features and health outcomes.
Dr. Doug Flora, from St. Elizabeth Healthcare Oncology, highlighted the AI’s pattern-recognition abilities: “AI is cool; it’s a pattern recognizer,” he said. “They took about 60,000 faces and analyzed those versus about 5,000 to 6,000 cancer patients. They said healthier patients versus cancer patients, and they were able to show this as a biologic proxy for survival.”
The results were noteworthy. The AI program assessing face age successfully outperformed doctors in predicting the survival of cancer patients after treatment.
Dr. Flora, the founder of the Journal AI in Precision Oncology, believes this could provide a more objective measure of a person’s biological age. “I think tools like this face age proxy might give you a more objective measure of that biologic age—rather than my best guess,” he said.
Cautions and Considerations
While online tests for face age are readily available, doctors emphasize that they should not be the sole basis for determining future health steps. These technologies could be a helpful tool for a more holistic view, but they should not be relied on exclusively.
