AI-based tissue clocks reveal organs age at different speeds

Researchers at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine (LBI-NetMed) at the University of Vienna have developed AI-based “tissue clocks” to estimate the biological age of individual organs.

By analyzing more than 25,000 high-resolution digital images across 40 different tissue types—including the brain, heart, lungs, pancreas, and skin—the study found that human organs do not age at a uniform rate. Instead, different organs follow distinct aging timelines.

Published in Nature Medicine, the research utilized data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression Project (GTEx). Unlike previous studies focusing on molecular changes like DNA methylation, this approach examines changes in the physical architecture of the tissue itself. The findings suggest that some of these organ-specific aging patterns may be detectable through blood tests, potentially offering new methods for disease monitoring and earlier diagnosis.