A healthcare technology company claims that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer than human doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study last month involving ten doctors who each evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved cancer detection accuracy of 84.7%, whereas the physicians’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
This research, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring resulted in predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to traditional methods.
According to Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study, the integration of AI made doctors not only more accurate but also more consistent in their assessments, leading to greater agreement among them when using AI support.
Doctors typically rely on MRI scans to gauge tumor size, but some tumors are ‘MRI-invisible,’ as noted by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He emphasized that AI can fill the gaps where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane remarked, “The overall use of AI in cancer treatment could lead to more effective and personalized patient care, with treatments more finely tuned to individual needs and more successful at combating the disease.” He added that AI has the potential to surpass human capabilities in this field.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is empowering for physicians to see such innovative solutions being validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the US will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lives, while 1 in 44 men will die from the illness. This year, it is estimated that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the United States, with 35,250 fatalities resulting from the disease.