Can one photo of your face reveal how ill you are?

US researchers say an AI tool could help estimate a patient’s survival outlook from a single face photo. The system, published in The Lancet Digital Health, was trained on millions of healthy faces and 35,000 images of cancer patients. It focuses on areas near the eyes and around the nose bridge, producing survival estimates across multiple cancer types and severities, including disease that had spread to bones or the brain. Most patients studied were in their 50s or 60s, though the dataset included children and people in their 90s. The tool is in development, with a patent application pending, and aims to support—not replace—clinicians.