An artificial intelligence healthcare company claims that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer than medical professionals.
Avenda Health published a study last month involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. The findings indicated that Avenda’s Unfold AI software identified cancer with an accuracy rate of 84.7%, while the manual assessments by physicians ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study also revealed that AI assistance in cancer contouring resulted in size predictions 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 a senior author of the study, noted that AI assistance enhanced both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ evaluations, leading to greater agreement among them.
Doctors commonly rely on MRIs to determine tumor size; however, according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, some tumors are not visible in MRIs. AI technology addresses this limitation.
Dr. Brisbane emphasized that AI’s integration into cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized care for patients, allowing for treatments that are better suited to individual needs and more successful in combating the disease. He added that AI capabilities can surpass human limitations.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed optimism about the validation of such innovations through research and recognition from the American Medical Association (AMA).
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. The organization estimates that there will be about 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the US this year, with 35,250 fatalities expected.