An AI healthcare company claims its software can more accurately detect the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study last month involving ten physicians who each evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the manual detection rates of the doctors ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
The study, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring predictions were 45 times more accurate and consistent than those made without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the senior author of the study, stated that the integration of AI assistance improved both the accuracy and consistency of the physicians’ assessments, leading to greater agreement among them.
Doctors often rely on MRIs to determine tumor size; however, some tumors are not visible through MRI scans, as noted by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI serves as a vital tool where MRI technology falls short.
Brisbane expressed that the implementation of AI in cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, offering treatments that are better suited to individual needs and more successful in combating the disease. He also remarked that AI has the potential to surpass human capabilities.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, commented on the encouraging validation of such innovation through studies, which have also been acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will receive a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. This year, it is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S., with an estimated 35,250 fatalities attributed to the illness.