Avenda Health, an AI healthcare company, claims that its software can detect the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than human doctors. A recent study conducted by the company involved ten doctors assessing 50 different prostate cancer cases. The findings showed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the physicians’ manual assessments varied between 67.2% and 75.9%.
The study, which was conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring significantly improved predictions of tumor size, being 45 times more accurate and reliable compared to assessments made without AI.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the senior author of the study, noted that the integration of AI assistance increased both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ evaluations, leading to greater agreement among them.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor sizes, but some tumors remain invisible in MRI scans. Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, explained that AI can provide valuable insights when MRIs fall short. He emphasized that incorporating AI into cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, with therapies that are better suited to individual requirements and are more successful in combating the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to witness such innovations gaining validation through studies and recognition from the American Medical Association (AMA).
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetimes, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer this year in the U.S., with an estimated 35,250 deaths resulting from the disease.