While wrinkles and gray hair might traditionally tell us about our age, scientists from Osaka Metropolitan University are suggesting we look deeper – literally, to our chest.
Using a high-tech AI model, they analyzed chest radiographs (or X-rays) to guess a person’s age. But here’s the catch – if the AI’s guess doesn’t match up with the person’s real age, it could hint at chronic diseases.
A Leap in Medical Imaging
This AI advancement is like giving doctors a new set of glasses. With it, they can potentially see early signs of diseases, allowing for timely medical intervention.
This innovative research is now published in a reputable journal, The Lancet Healthy Longevity.
Yasuhito Mitsuyama, a grad student, along with Dr. Daiju Ueda, spearheaded this research. Their first step was to train the AI using X-rays from healthy people.
After that, they let the AI analyze X-rays from people with known diseases to see any connection between the AI’s age guess and certain diseases.
To make sure the AI wasn’t just memorizing specific X-ray patterns, they used a vast and varied dataset gathered from multiple places.
In total, they examined 67,099 chest X-rays from 36,051 healthy folks who had regular health check-ups at three different places between 2008 and 2021.
The results? The AI was pretty spot-on! When they compared the age guessed by the AI to the real age of the person, they found a very strong correlation.
In scientific terms, they found a correlation coefficient of 0.95, which is pretty close to a perfect 1.
What It Means for Detecting Diseases
The researchers took things further by testing on another 34,197 X-rays from patients diagnosed with specific diseases.
They found that if the AI’s age guess was higher than the patient’s actual age, that patient was more likely to have certain chronic illnesses like hypertension or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Yasuhito Mitsuyama remarked, “Chronological age is a vital piece of information in medicine.”
He added that the age estimated from a chest X-ray might give doctors a clearer picture of a person’s overall health, beyond just their years on Earth.
This finding has opened up exciting possibilities for the future, from assessing how severe a chronic disease is, guessing how long a patient might live, to predicting any potential issues in surgeries.
Conclusion
The next time you think about age, it might be worth remembering that it’s not just skin deep.
With this groundbreaking research, a simple chest X-ray, combined with the power of AI, could reveal a lot more about our health and well-being.
As technology and medicine continue to intertwine, who knows what other mysteries they might unravel together!
If you care about health, please read studies about why vitamin K is so important for older people, and this snack food may harm your heart rhythm.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about vitamin that may protect you from type 2 diabetes, and results showing this common chemical in food may harm your blood pressure.
The study was published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity.
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