AI system detects biological tissue clocks in blood

Researchers in Vienna have developed an artificial intelligence system capable of detecting ‘tissue clocks’ within the blood. According to a report in ‘Nature Medicine’, the AI was trained by analyzing vast amounts of images from tissue samples across various organs at different stages of human life. This allowed the system to learn how to estimate the age of an organ or its host based solely on visual characteristics.

Led by André Rendeiro, the project involved the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine at the University of Vienna. The machine learning model was trained using 25,712 tissue samples representing 40 different tissue types from 29 organs, including the heart and brain, collected from 983 individuals.

This technology aims to address the difficulty of assessing the impact of aging on tissue composition before visible degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, become apparent.