Artificial intelligence can determine the biological age of internal organs, which may age at different rates, reports infohub.kz.
Scientists from the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine have developed AI-based histological "tissue clocks." The team analyzed over 25,000 microscopic images of 40 tissue types from 983 individuals. The study showed that changes in organ structure reflect biological age more accurately than traditional methods.
The analysis revealed that the lungs, kidneys, pancreas, and adrenal glands can show signs of accelerated aging as early as ages 20 to 40. Other organs age along different trajectories: for example, the uterus undergoes its most pronounced transformation during menopause. Diseases also leave their mark—kidney failure and diabetes significantly accelerate these processes.
The researchers correlated tissue structure data with gene expression levels in blood. This allowed them to train AI to detect specific aging signals of internal organs using a simple blood test. In the future, this approach could help diagnose Alzheimer's disease, Crohn's disease, and diabetes at early stages.