An AI healthcare company claims that its software can identify the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than medical professionals.
Avenda Health conducted a study last month involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 distinct prostate cancer cases. The findings revealed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software identified cancer with an accuracy of 84.7%, compared to the manual assessments by physicians, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
This study, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also indicated that utilizing AI for cancer contouring resulted in size predictions that were 45 times more accurate and consistent than traditional methods without AI support.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, mentioned that the incorporation of AI assistance significantly improved both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ evaluations. He noted that physicians using AI tended to agree more in their assessments.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to determine tumor size; however, Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, pointed out that some tumors are not visible on MRIs. He stated that AI fills the gap in areas where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane emphasized that employing AI in cancer treatment could facilitate more effective and personalized patient care, with treatments that are better suited to individual circumstances and more successful in combating the illness. He asserted that AI has the potential to surpass human capabilities.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that it is “empowering for physicians to see this kind of innovation being validated through studies and recognized by the AMA.”
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men dying from 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 resulting from the illness.