Avenda Health, an AI healthcare company, claims that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
A study released by Avenda last month involved ten doctors evaluating 50 different prostate cancer cases. The results showed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, whereas the physicians’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, the study highlighted that the use of AI for cancer contouring resulted in cancer size predictions being 45 times more accurate and consistent than those made without AI assistance.
“This study demonstrates that AI assistance not only improved the accuracy of doctors but also fostered greater consistency among them, leading to more agreement when using AI tools,” said Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author.
Traditionally, doctors rely on MRIs to determine tumor size; however, some tumors can be “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI can provide insight where MRIs may fall short.
Brisbane noted, “The integration of AI in cancer treatment has the potential to enhance personalized care for patients, allowing for treatment plans that are more effectively tailored to their unique situations and more successful in combating the disease.” He added that AI can surpass human capabilities in this context.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that it is encouraging to witness such innovations being validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association (AMA).
Statistics from the American Cancer Society indicate that approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men succumbing to the disease. It is anticipated that in 2023, there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S., with 35,250 potential fatalities attributed to the disease.