ArticleNature metabolism2020
Three-dimensional facial-image analysis to predict heterogeneity of the human ageing rate and the impact of lifestyle.
Article in Nature metabolism, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 92 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Non-invasive characterization of the relationship between skin microrelief and dermal-epidermal junction topography using line-field confocal optical coherence tomography (LC-OCT).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Evolving Landscape of Clinical Aging Clocks: From Epigenetic to Multi-Omics Integration.Aging cell · 2026Review
- Face aging rate quantifies change in biological age to predict cancer outcomes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Multimodal Assessment of Biological Age Following Radiation Therapy Among Patients With Early-Stage NSCLC.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Multiomic single-cell perturbation screens reveal critical lncRNA regulators of senescence.Nature aging · 2026Article
- Improving Face Age Prediction by Using Multiple-Angle Photos.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Article
- Artificial intelligence approaches in biological age prediction: current status and challenges.British journal of biomedical science · 2026Review
- Molecular markers, mechanisms and metrics of biological aging: a scoping review.Frontiers in aging · 2026Review
- Biomarkers of ageing of humans and non-human primates.Nature reviews. Molecular cell biology · 2025Review
- The X-Age Project to construct a Chinese aging clock.Nature aging · 2025Review
- Association between the retinal age gap and systemic diseases in the Japanese population: the Nagahama study.Japanese journal of ophthalmology · 2025Article
- Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
28 authors at 8 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Not all individuals age at the same rate. Methods such as the 'methylation clock' are invasive, rely on expensive assays of tissue samples and infer the ageing rate by training on chronological age, which is used as a reference for prediction errors. Here, we develop models based on convoluted neural networks through training on non-invasive three-dimensional (3D) facial images of approximately 5,000 Han Chinese individuals that achieve an average difference between chronological or perceived age and predicted age of ±2.8 and 2.9 yr, respectively. We further profile blood transcriptomes from 280 individuals and infer the molecular regulators mediating the impact of lifestyle on the facial-ageing rate through a causal-inference model. These relationships have been deposited and visualized in the Human Blood Gene Expression-3D Facial Image (HuB-Fi) database. Overall, we find that humans age at different rates both in the blood and in the face, but do so coherently and with heterogeneity peaking at middle age. Our study provides an example of how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to determine the perceived age of humans as a marker of biological age, while no longer relying on prediction errors of chronological age, and to estimate the heterogeneity of ageing rates within a population.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.