An AI healthcare company has announced that its software can detect the extent of prostate cancer with greater accuracy than human doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study involving ten doctors, each tasked with evaluating 50 distinct prostate cancer cases. Their AI software, Unfold AI, achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7%, while the physicians’ manual detection efforts varied between 67.2% and 75.9%.
The collaborative study, carried out with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, revealed that incorporating AI in cancer contouring led to predictions regarding tumor size being 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to traditional methods.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the senior author of the study, noted that the use of AI assistance improved both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ assessments, resulting in greater agreement among them.
While doctors typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor sizes, some tumors remain “MRI-invisible,” which creates challenges. Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, stated that AI can address situations where MRIs fall short. He added that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could lead to more effective and personalized healthcare, tailored to meet individual patient needs and enhancing treatment success rates.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is empowering for physicians to see such innovations validated through research and recognized by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, while 1 in 44 men 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.