Deep Integrated Biomarkers of Aging

Abstract

Recent advances in deep learning (DL) and other machine learning methods (ML) and the availability of large population data sets annotated with age and other features led to the development of the many predictors of chronological age frequently referred to as the deep aging clocks (DACs). Many of these aging clocks were pioneered by Insilico Medicine and are available for testing online via www.young.ai, www.aging.ai, and other resources. Several of the DACs demonstrate biological relevance and can be used for a variety of applications ranging from aging and disease target identification, identifying the age-related features implicated in diseases, the inference of causal graphs, analyze the population-specificity of the data type and analyze the mechanism of drug response and many others. The generative adversarial networks (GANs) can be used to synthesize new data of patients of specified ages in large volume providing for novel target identification techniques, as well as for anonymization and patient privacy methods. In this chapter we provide a brief overview of the DACs, their advantages, and disadvantages as well as the commentary on the challenges in this emerging field.