An AI healthcare company claims that its software has the ability to detect the extent of prostate cancer with greater accuracy than that of medical professionals.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 distinct prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved a detection accuracy of 84.7%, whereas the physicians’ accuracy ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study also highlighted that AI-assisted cancer contouring resulted in predictions of tumor size being 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to traditional methods.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the senior author of the study, noted that the use of AI not only increased the accuracy of the doctors but also improved their consistency, leading to greater agreement among physicians when utilizing AI support.
Typically, doctors employ MRIs to assess tumor size; however, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” explained Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI is effective in cases where MRIs fall short.
Dr. Brisbane remarked that integrating AI into cancer treatment could enable more effective and personalized patient care, as treatments could be better customized to individual needs, ultimately enhancing their success against the disease. He asserted that AI has the potential to exceed human capabilities.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that the validation of such innovations through studies and acknowledgment by the American Medical Association (AMA) is empowering for medical practitioners.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. This year, it is estimated that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the United States, with 35,250 fatalities resulting from the illness.