One signal

Update

What changed

The BBC says the cancer-survival tool, called FaceSurvival, was trained on millions of healthy faces and 35,000 photographs of cancer patients. Researchers say it estimates survival by analysing facial features, with the area under the eyes and around the bridge of the nose among the features most influential in its predictions.

The report says the researchers tested the metrics across different cancers and levels of severity, including cancers that had spread to patients’ bones or brains. The patient group included people from the US and the Netherlands, from children to people in their 90s.

The team is also evaluating FaceAge, a separate tool intended to estimate biological age from a face photo. The BBC says researchers still need more data, particularly from people of different ethnic backgrounds, and an expert quoted by the BBC called clinical use premature.

Sources and evidence

• Can one photo of your face reveal how ill you are? – BBC: The BBC reports that researchers trained FaceSurvival on millions of healthy faces and 35,000 cancer-patient photographs to estimate cancer survival from facial features, while stressing that the tool is not ready for clinical use.

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