An artificial intelligence healthcare firm claims that its software can detect the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than medical professionals.
Avenda Health published a study last month involving ten doctors who each evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved a cancer detection accuracy of 84.7%, compared to the accuracy range of 67.2% to 75.9% for the physicians conducting manual assessments.
This research, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and appearing in the Journal of Urology, also revealed that utilizing AI for cancer contouring resulted in size predictions that were 45 times more accurate and consistent than traditional methods.
Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study, remarked that AI assistance led to greater accuracy and consistency among doctors, who tended to agree more when they had AI support.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to assess tumor size; however, some tumors are not visible on these scans. Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, stated that AI fills the gaps where MRIs are inadequate.
Brisbane expressed that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could facilitate more effective and personalized patient care, resulting in treatments better aligned with individual patient needs and more successful in combating the disease. He noted that AI has the potential to exceed human capabilities.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan emphasized the importance of having such innovations validated through studies and recognized by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer over their lifetimes, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S. this year, with an estimated 35,250 fatalities attributed to the disease.