An AI healthcare company claims its software is capable of more accurately assessing the extent of prostate cancer than human doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved a detection accuracy of 84.7%, in contrast to the manual detection accuracy rates of the physicians, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
The research, carried out alongside UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring predictions were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to evaluations without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, highlighted that the integration of AI made doctors’ assessments more precise and aligned, resulting in greater consensus among them.
Doctors typically employ MRIs to determine tumor sizes. However, some tumors are not visible via MRI, as noted by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. AI technology provides a solution in these challenging cases where MRIs fall short.
Dr. Brisbane also remarked that utilizing AI in cancer treatment could enhance patient care, offering more personalized and effective treatment strategies to combat the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, 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 receive a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 will ultimately succumb to the disease. In 2023, there are projections of 299,010 new prostate cancer cases and 35,250 deaths attributed to the illness in the country.