Artificial intelligence approaches in biological age prediction: current status and challenges

Biological age (BA) prediction has emerged as a critical research frontier for evaluating individual health status and aging trajectories beyond chronological age (CA). Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have substantially accelerated this field by enabling the integration and interpretation of complex, multimodal biological data. This review provides a systematic overview of AI-driven approaches to BA prediction, covering key components including biomarker selection, feature engineering, model development, bias correction, and performance evaluation. We further highlight the growing recognition of asynchronous aging, a phenomenon in which different organs or physiological systems age at distinct rates, and discuss how AI-particularly deep learning and multimodal fusion-offers powerful tools for capturing such system-specific aging patterns. We summarize current methodologies ranging from traditional machine learning algorithms to advanced neural architectures capable of modeling nonlinear and heterogeneous aging processes. The expanding applications of AI-based BA models in disease risk assessment, geriatric evaluation, and population health monitoring are also examined. Despite rapid methodological progress, significant challenges persist, including data heterogeneity, limited model generalizability, insufficient interpretability, and barriers to clinical translation. Addressing these issues will require standardized methodological practices, robust validation across diverse populations, and the development of interpretable and equitable AI systems. Future research should prioritize the integration of multi-omics and longitudinal datasets with AI-driven analytical frameworks to establish reliable, system-level, and clinically actionable BA prediction models that account for asynchronous aging.