A newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) model can estimate one’s age from their chest X-ray. The new research published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity journal said that the model can also signal chronic diseases such as hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease from the difference between estimated and chronological age.
The findings of the research from Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan, have marked a leap in medical imaging and paved the way for improved early disease detection and intervention.
For age estimation, the AI model was trained using around 67,100 chest radiographs of 36,051 healthy individuals who underwent health check-ups between 2008 and 2021. It showed a strong correlation between the AI-estimated age and the chronological age of the individuals. The model was then trained to analyse the link between the AI-estimated age and each disease on additional 34,197 chest radiographs compiled from as many patients with known diseases. In all, it was trained on 1,01,300 chest X-rays from 70,248 participants across five institutions in Japan.
The difference between the individual’s AI-estimated age and chronological age was found to be associated with one’s chronic diseases, which meant that higher the age the AI estimated, higher the likelihood of these individuals to have these diseases.
