A research team from the Molecular Medicine Research Center of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (SIM) and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Medical Sciences of the University of Vienna have developed an artificial intelligence system they call the “tissue clock,” through which the biological age of human body organs can be estimated based on histological images, and early prediction of diseases using blood samples in the future.
By examining more than 25,000 images, including samples from 40 different types of body tissues, the researchers found that human organs do not age at the same pace, and that it is possible to follow the pace of aging through blood samples.
The new system mainly sheds light on the physical structure of tissues and whether they contain a record that allows determining the age of various body organs. The researchers used data from the Tissue Gene Expression Project (GTEX), which contains samples from 983 people related to 40 different types of tissues such as the brain, heart, lungs, pancreas, skin and intestines.
As part of the study, these samples were converted into high-quality digital images that reveal the microscopic structure of each organ. The researchers analyzed 25,712 different images, representing about 480 million square sections of digital images of different individual samples, using highly advanced computer imaging models. The results revealed the existence of different paths of aging for each type of living tissue, as accelerated aging begins in some organs, such as the lung, kidney, pancreas, and adrenaline gland, at an early stage of life, in the age group between 20 and 40 years. While aging accelerates for other organs in later stages of life.
The experiment also revealed that accelerated aging of some organs may be associated with some pathological conditions or physiological changes, such as kidney failure in the case of the kidneys, or diabetes in the case of the pancreas.