An artificial intelligence healthcare company has announced that its software can identify the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than medical professionals.
Avenda Health conducted a study last month involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 different cases of prostate cancer. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, compared to the manual detection accuracy of physicians, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
The study, carried out in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, revealed that using AI for cancer contouring resulted in size predictions that were 45 times more accurate and consistent than traditional methods.
According to Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology and senior author of the study, AI assistance not only improved doctors’ accuracy but also enhanced their consistency, leading to greater agreement among physicians when utilizing AI tools.
Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA, noted that while doctors commonly use MRI scans to assess tumor size, some tumors may be undetectable through MRI. He emphasized that AI could provide valuable insights in these challenging cases, stating that AI has the potential to “go beyond human ability.”
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed optimism about the validation of such innovations through research and recognition by the American Medical Association (AMA).
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and about 1 in 44 will die from 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 from the illness.