An artificial intelligence healthcare company has claimed that its software can more accurately determine the extent of prostate cancer than human doctors.
Avenda Health published a study last month involving ten physicians, each of whom evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software demonstrated an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, compared to the range of 67.2% to 75.9% achieved by the doctors conducting manual assessments.
The research, carried out in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, indicated that using AI for cancer contouring significantly improved the accuracy of cancer size predictions, making them 45 times more reliable with AI assistance than without.
According to Dr. Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor at UCLA and the study’s senior author, the integration of AI led to greater accuracy and consistency among physicians, allowing them to reach more agreements when utilizing AI tools.
Doctors generally rely on MRIs to gauge tumor sizes; however, some tumors are not visible on these scans, as noted by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI fills gaps where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane highlighted that incorporating AI into cancer treatment could foster more effective and personalized care, with therapies being better customized for individual patients and more successful in combating the illness. He pointed out that AI has the potential to surpass human capabilities.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed his enthusiasm for the validation of such innovations through research and recognition by the American Medical Association.
Statistics from the American Cancer Society reveal that approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men succumbing to the disease. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S. this year, with 35,250 fatalities linked to the illness.