An AI healthcare company claims its software can more accurately detect the extent of prostate cancer compared to doctors. Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The study revealed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, whereas physicians’ manual detection efforts ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the research also indicated that AI-assisted cancer contouring significantly improved predictions of tumor size, making them 45 times more accurate than predictions made without AI.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted that AI assistance improved both accuracy and consistency among doctors, leading to greater agreement in assessments.
While doctors typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size, some tumors remain “MRI-invisible,” as explained by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He emphasized that AI can fill the gaps left by MRIs.
Brisbane remarked that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could enhance the effectiveness and personalization of patient care, allowing treatments to be better tailored to individual needs and more successful in combating the disease.
Dr. Natarajan, the CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to see such innovations validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association (AMA).
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the illness. This year, it is estimated that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S., with 35,250 fatalities attributed to the disease.