An artificial intelligence healthcare company claims that its software is able to detect the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than human doctors.
Avenda Health recently conducted a study involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The findings revealed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in identifying cancer, compared to the manual detection rates of the physicians, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
The research, carried out in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also demonstrated that AI-assisted cancer contouring significantly improved predictions of cancer size, making them 45 times more accurate and consistent than those made without AI assistance.
“We observed that AI assistance enhanced both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ assessments, leading to greater agreement among them,” stated Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study.
While doctors generally rely on MRIs to assess tumor size, 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 provides critical insights in these challenging cases.
“Integrating AI into cancer treatment could enable more effective and personalized care for patients, allowing for treatments that are better customized to their unique needs and more successful in combating the disease,” Brisbane added, asserting that AI has the potential to exceed human capabilities.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that it is “empowering for physicians” to see such innovations validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men succumbing to the illness. The society estimates that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases this year in the U.S., with 35,250 resulting in death.