By looking at the face, AI will be able to tell how long the patient will live!

US researchers say an artificial intelligence (AI) tool can help doctors understand how sick a patient is by just looking at a photograph of his face.

According to scientists, this tool has been trained on millions of healthy faces and 35,000 photographs of cancer patients. It can estimate how long a patient can live by looking closely at the areas around the eyes.

Researchers say it will take a long time for it to become suitable for use in hospitals, but their aim is to help doctors choose the right treatment for their patients. These initial results have been published in the journal 'Lancet Digital Health'.

The name of this AI tool is 'FaceSurvival'. This tool says that to estimate how much life is left in someone, the most important part of the face is the area below the eyes and the upper part of the nose between the two eyes. These are the areas of the face the tool gives most importance to when predicting how long a patient is likely to live.

Researchers say that these scales fit many types of cancer, whether they are mild or severe. These also included cases in which the cancer had spread to the patient's bones or brain. Most of the cancer patients whose photographs were used to develop this tool were from the US and the Netherlands and their age was between 50 and 70 years.

However, doctors already examine the patients and conduct various tests to know how ill the patient is and what his condition may be like in the future. A patent has been applied for this AI tool, which is currently awaiting approval. It is designed to assist doctors, not replace them.

"As people age, doctors need appropriate advice about whether they can choose treatments such as radiation, surgery or systemic therapy. This helps them assess how much strength a patient has left and how weak he or she is," said lead researcher Dr. Raymond Mack, of Mass General Brigham Hospital in Boston.

Mack and his colleagues are testing another AI tool that estimates someone's biological age. The name of this tool is 'FaceEdge'. According to this, the skin under the nose and around the mouth can give a good indication of how fast a person is aging.

Doctor Mac says that even on different types of photographs taken in normal life, the results of this tool remained surprisingly similar. The researchers stressed that much more data and facial images are needed to truly assess how these tools work. More photos are needed, especially of people from different racial groups.