An artificial intelligence healthcare firm has announced that its software can more accurately detect the extent of prostate cancer compared to human doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases each. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the physicians’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9% accuracy.
The study, carried out in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring predictions for tumor size were 45 times more precise and consistent than those made without AI.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the senior author of the study, emphasized that AI assistance resulted in greater accuracy and consistency among doctors, leading to improved agreement in their assessments.
While doctors typically utilize MRIs to determine tumor sizes, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He noted that AI can provide assistance where MRIs fail.
Dr. Brisbane highlighted the potential of AI in cancer treatment to enable more effective and personalized patient care, with approaches better suited to individual needs and increasing the chances of combating the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that it is encouraging for healthcare providers to witness this innovation 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, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the illness. Projections indicate there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S. this year, with an estimated 35,250 fatalities resulting from the disease.