Can AI really predict cancer survival better than a doctor? I have my doubts | Devi Sridhar

Take a selfie to see how healthy you are: the idea is enticing and this new research is promising. But so many factors have been ignored The idea that a single selfie could predict how long someone with cancer may live sounds like an incredible breakthrough. AI is getting better at spotting patterns in medical data, but can it be used to reliably predict what will happen to an individual patient? I asked a clinical colleague what she thought about the recent headlines . She found it an interesting development given that doctors have long used facial appearance to assess patient health.

For example, she noted that they may write “appears stated age” or “appears older than stated age” as a proxy for general health. Now, researchers from Mass General Brigham, a healthcare institution in Massachusetts, have taken this idea a step further. They have developed an AI model trained on more than 40 million facial images – called FAHR-Face – to assess biological age and predict survival in cancer patients. For biological age, they developed FAHR-FaceAge, which estimates age from certain facial features such as the forehead, the wrinkles between the nose and mouth and the temples. For cancer survival, they developed…