An artificial intelligence healthcare company claims that its software can more accurately detect the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health published a study last month involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. 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%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study demonstrated that AI-assisted cancer contouring substantially improved the predictions of cancer size, making them 45 times more accurate and consistent than assessments made without AI.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, stated that the incorporation of AI assistance helped doctors not only improve their accuracy but also enhanced consensus among them.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to evaluate tumor sizes; however, as Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, explained, some tumors are not visible through MRIs. He emphasized that AI can fill in the gaps where MRIs fail.
Brisbane mentioned that utilizing AI in cancer treatment has the potential to facilitate more personalized and effective patient care, tailoring treatments to individual needs and improving outcomes.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that the validation of such innovations through studies, coupled with recognition by the American Medical Association, is empowering for physicians.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 will succumb to the disease. The organization estimates that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S. this year, with 35,250 deaths resulting from the illness.