Doctors have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can predict a cancer patient’s chances of survival from a single photograph of their face.
The AI system was custom-built by experts at Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit, integrated academic healthcare system in Massachusetts, to estimate biological age and directly predict survival outcomes in patients diagnosed with cancer.
It is one of the most comprehensive demonstrations to date of how AI analysis of a selfie could help assess a patient’s health and potentially guide their medical care, and was trained on data from more than 40 million facial photographs across a range of ethnicities and ages.
Details of the breakthrough were published in the Lancet Digital Health journal.
The system can estimate a person’s biological age – the age a person looks, rather than their actual, chronological age – and predict the chances of survival for cancer patients from an ordinary photograph of their face, according to the results of a study that examined the model.
“FAHR-FaceSurvival advances the field of facial health recognition AI a step further by learning survival risk directly from facial photographs of patients with cancer,” said Hugo Aerts, a co-senior author of the study. “To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that an AI model can directly predict cancer survival from a simple photograph.”
Source: The Guardian, 19 October 2026
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