You know what? The most immediate purpose of cosmetic surgery is to make people look younger. But until now, it has been difficult to have an accurate way to tell how much younger a person really is after plastic surgery. But now, a new study from the United States has made a big breakthrough!
Researchers at Hofstra Zucker School of Medicine in the US have found that artificial intelligence can actually quantify the success of cosmetic surgery – that is, it can tell you how many years you look younger after the procedure.
Senior author Dr. James P. Bradley, associate chair of the Department of surgery, said: “Our research shows that AI algorithms are now very good at not only identifying successful procedures, but also putting an age number on the success.”
Even amid the coronavirus pandemic, people’s enthusiasm for cosmetic surgery has not diminished. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, more than 234,000 people will have a facial lift in 2020. To explore the effects of cosmetic surgery, the researchers used an artificial intelligence program called a convolutional neural network to examine the surgical outcomes of 50 cosmetic patients.
Dr Bradley explained: ‘These neural networks, trained on a dataset of millions of public images, learn a lot more’ experience ‘than normal people, so they can recognise facial features very well.’
In the experiment, the study authors used four different, publicly available neural networks. They had the AI program examine photos of each patient before and one year after the procedure. The patients were also asked to rate their appearance on a questionnaire to estimate how many years they looked younger. The researchers noted that the 50 patients were all women and had an average age of 58.7 years at the time of surgery.
The results were interesting: the AI system was able to identify each person’s age before surgery with 100% accuracy. When it comes to the post-surgery photos, the computer algorithm concluded that the procedure can reduce a person’s appearance by 4.3 years. But the patients themselves said their procedures had made them 6.7 years younger on average.
Dr Bradley said: ‘Patients may have a tendency to overestimate how young they look after cosmetic surgery, perhaps because of the emotional and financial investment they have made in the procedure.
Although cosmetic surgery did not shorten their age as much as patients thought, they were generally satisfied with the results. On the FACE-Q questionnaire, participants rated their facial appearance 75 out of 100 and quality of life above 80. And the younger the AI program perceived the patient’s age, the more satisfied they were with the results.
Dr Bradley concluded: “Neural networks and the image analysis tools used in modern plastic surgery can play an important role in demonstrating the successful results of facial rejuvenation surgery. We feel that AI algorithms can also help plastic surgeons evaluate their own results and compare the effectiveness of different techniques.”
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