FAHR-Face AI estimates biological age from facial photos and flags mortality risk in cancer patients

Key facts

• Researchers developed an AI model called Foundation Artificial Intelligence for Health Recognition-Face (FAHR-Face), trained on more than 40 million facial photographs, to estimate biological age and predict death risk.
• The findings were published in The Lancet Digital Health in 2026; on publicly available photographs the model estimated biological age with an average error of about five years.
• Among 38,183 patients treated at six US centres affiliated with Harvard, those appearing biologically older than their actual age tended to have poorer survival outcomes.
• A second model, FAHR-FaceSurvival, was trained on photographs of 34,363 cancer patients and tested on 3,820 others; patients in the highest-risk group were more than three times as likely to die as those in the lowest-risk group, even after accounting for clinical and demographic factors.
• The models were also tested on 4,892 cancer patients in the Netherlands, suggesting the AI could estimate survival risk beyond the original US population.