An AI healthcare company claims that its software can detect the extent of prostate cancer with greater accuracy than traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health recently conducted a study involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. The results revealed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software successfully identified cancer with an accuracy rate of 84.7%. In contrast, the accuracy of doctors conducting manual assessments ranged between 67.2% and 75.9%.
This study, which was conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also highlighted that AI-assisted cancer contouring yielded predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to those made without AI assistance.
According to Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, the integration of AI in evaluations made physicians both more accurate and consistent, resulting in a higher level of agreement among doctors.
Currently, doctors often rely on MRIs to assess tumor sizes; however, as noted by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, some tumors remain “MRI-invisible.” AI technology can provide assistance in these challenging cases.
Dr. Brisbane emphasized that utilizing AI in cancer treatment can lead to more personalized and effective patient care, enabling treatments that are better suited to individual needs and more effective in combating the disease. He remarked that AI has the potential to “go beyond human ability.”
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that the validation of such innovations through studies and recognition by the American Medical Association is empowering for doctors.
In the United States, approximately 1 in 8 men are expected to be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lives, and 1 in 44 will succumb to the disease, according to data from the American Cancer Society. This year, it is estimated that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the US, with 35,250 fatalities attributed to the disease.