An AI healthcare company has announced that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to human doctors.
Avenda Health recently published a study featuring ten physicians who evaluated 50 different cases of prostate cancer. The study revealed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, whereas the doctors’ manual assessments yielded results between 67.2% and 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and documented in the Journal of Urology, the study also indicated that using AI for cancer contouring significantly enhanced predictions of tumor size, making them 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to traditional methods.
Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor at UCLA and senior author of the study, highlighted that AI assistance improved both the accuracy and consistency of the physicians’ assessments, leading to greater agreement among doctors using the AI tools.
While MRI scans are commonly employed to evaluate tumor size, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” noted Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI steps in where MRIs are lacking.
Dr. Brisbane added that the integration of AI in cancer treatment has the potential to provide more effective and personalized care for patients, allowing for treatment plans that are better suited to individual needs and more successful in combating the disease. He remarked that AI has the ability to “go beyond human ability.”
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed his enthusiasm regarding the validation of this innovation through studies and its recognition by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 1 in 44 will succumb to the disease. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S. this year, with 35,250 deaths attributable to it.