An AI healthcare company has announced that its software can identify the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than physicians.
Avenda Health conducted a study involving ten doctors who each reviewed 50 prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved a detection accuracy of 84.7%, while the manual assessments by doctors ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
The research, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, revealed that using AI for cancer contouring significantly improved predictions of tumor size, making them 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to traditional methods.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, commented that AI assistance enhanced both the accuracy and consistency of the doctors’ assessments, leading to greater agreement among them.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to determine tumor sizes, but some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” noted Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA. He emphasized that AI can help identify tumors that MRIs may miss.
Dr. Brisbane stated that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could provide more effective and personalized care, tailoring treatments to individual patient needs and increasing the chance of successfully combating the disease. He added that AI has the capacity to surpass human capabilities.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is empowering for physicians to see such innovations endorsed through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
Statistics from the American Cancer Society indicate that approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will receive a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, and about 1 in 44 men will die from the disease. This year, an estimated 299,010 new prostate cancer cases are expected in the U.S., with 35,250 fatalities attributed to the illness.