Find out your real age: Can AI guess it by looking at your chest?

What’s up, STEAM enthusiasts? Get ready for news that could change the way we view X-rays and our own age. Have you ever wondered if your chest can reveal your true age? The scientists at Osaka Metropolitan University have definitely done it! Imagine this: Instead of looking at your face in the mirror, you could look at your chest X-ray to find out how old you are. Science fiction? No, it’s artificial intelligence in action.

So these brilliant brains in Osaka have created a super-advanced artificial intelligence model that uses chest X-rays to guess your age. Yes, really! But that’s not all folks, when this AI detects a difference between your “real” and estimated age, it could be a sign that something is wrong with your health. In other words, your X-ray not only shows your bones, but it could also be an indicator of possible health problems.

The team behind it, led by Yasuhito Mitsuyama and Dr. Daiju Ueda, not only created an age-guessing AI model, but also tested it on healthy people and patients with known diseases. And boy, were the results exciting! They gathered a ton of chest x-rays from over 36,000 healthy people from three different locations, and their AI model was 95% correct. That’s a pretty high score in the world of correlations, but what about people with disease?

Well, here’s the kicker: when the AI ​​estimated someone to be older than they really were, that was linked to chronic diseases like hypertension, hyperuricemia, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease! So here we are, with an AI that could tell us more about our health than we thought. In Mitsuyama’s words: “Chronological age is important, but the apparent age shown on your chest X-ray can reveal more about your health than you realize.” Their goal is to take this even further and use it to predict how severe chronic diseases might be, how long we might live, and to what extent we might face surgical complications.