An artificial intelligence healthcare company claims its software can more accurately detect the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The results indicated that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer. In contrast, the manual assessments by physicians varied, reaching an accuracy between 67.2% and 75.9%.
The study, which was carried out in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring significantly improved predictions of tumor size, achieving 45 times more accuracy and consistency than assessments without AI.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, remarked that AI assistance enhanced both the accuracy and consistency of the doctors’ assessments, leading to greater consensus among them.
Doctors typically rely on MRI scans to determine tumor size; however, some tumors cannot be detected through MRI, described by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He stated that AI can identify these “MRI-invisible” tumors.
Brisbane emphasized that integrating AI into cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, as it enables treatments to be better suited to individual needs, potentially improving success rates in combating the disease. He noted that AI has the capability to exceed human capabilities.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to see such innovations validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately one in eight men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with one in 44 likely to 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 resulting from the illness.