A healthcare technology company has announced that its software can identify the extent of prostate cancer with greater accuracy than medical professionals.
Avenda Health conducted a study last month involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, compared to the manual detection rates of physicians, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
The research, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also revealed that using AI for cancer contouring resulted in cancer size predictions that were 45 times more accurate and consistent than predictions made without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, stated that the integration of AI made physicians both more accurate and more consistent in their assessments, leading to increased agreement among doctors when using AI tools.
Physicians typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size; however, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He noted that AI fills in the gaps where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane emphasized that the application of AI in cancer treatment could facilitate more effective and personalized patient care, offering treatments that are better suited to individual needs and enhancing the chances of successfully combating the disease. He remarked that AI has the potential to surpass human capabilities.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed pride in seeing such innovations being validated through scientific studies and recognized by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, roughly 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the US this year, with an estimated 35,250 fatalities resulting from the illness.