2025/06/16 by Tristan Kenneweg, Kenneweg, Tristan, Philip Kenneweg +3
Computer Science · Engineering · Social Sciences · #3D Shape Modeling and Analysis #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.13430
openalex publication_date 2025/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Predicting mortality-related outcomes from images offers the prospect of accessible, noninvasive, and scalable health screening. We present a method that leverages pretrained vision transformer foundation models to estimate remaining lifespan from facial and whole-body images, alongside robust uncertainty quantification. We show that predictive uncertainty varies systematically with the true remaining lifespan, and that this uncertainty can be effectively modeled by learning a Gaussian distribution for each sample. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art mean absolute error (MAE) of 7.41 years on an established dataset, and further achieves 4.91 and 4.99 years MAE on two new, higher-quality datasets curated and published in this work. Importantly, our models provide calibrated uncertainty estimates, as demonstrated by a bucketed expected calibration error of 0.82 years on the Faces Dataset. While not intended for clinical deployment, these results highlight the potential of extracting medically relevant signals from images. We make all code and datasets available to facilitate further research.