A photo of your face could tell doctors how long you have left to live. 

The breakthrough is just the latest science fiction-adjacent development courtesy of AI’s immense capacity for crunching data. In the new study, published in Lancet Digital Health, researchers describe how they leveraged a novel AI model to predict mortality risk in cancer patients. 

The tool, known as FAHR-FaceSurvival (Foundation Artificial Intelligence for Health Recognition), relies on an AI foundation model that the Mass General Brigham research team trained on over 40 million general photos of faces and a different set of over 30,000 facial photos of patients with cancer. The cancer patient’s facial images were attached to details about their medical outcomes, allowing researchers to test the model’s accuracy.

“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,” study co-author Hugo Aerts said. “To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that an AI model can directly predict cancer survival from a simple photograph.”

A high score from the FAHR-FaceSurvival tool was “significantly associated with early mortality risk,” according to the study’s results. Out of facial images that earned the highest 10% of scores, half of those 122 patients died within three months, compared with just 2% of those in the group with the lowest scores.

The cancer survival model focused specifically on the part of the face below the eyes and around the bridge of the nose, although researchers don’t fully understand what the AI system saw in those parts of the face.

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