A healthcare technology company claims its artificial intelligence software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer than physicians.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The findings revealed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy of 84.7% in detecting cancer, compared to the manual assessments of doctors, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study also highlighted that AI-assisted cancer contouring resulted in predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more accurate and consistent than traditional methods.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted that AI assistance led to increased accuracy and consistency among doctors, who showed greater agreement when utilizing AI tools.
Typically, MRIs are used to determine tumor size, but some tumors are not visible through this imaging technique, according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI can provide insights where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane stated that integrating AI into cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, tailoring therapies to individual needs and improving success rates against the disease. He remarked that AI has the potential to surpass human capabilities.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is “empowering for physicians to see this kind of innovation validated through studies and acknowledged by the AMA.”
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lives, and 1 in 44 will succumb to the disease. This year, it is estimated that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S., with 35,250 fatalities attributed to the illness.