An artificial intelligence healthcare company has announced that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer than traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the participating doctors’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study also revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring predictions regarding tumor size were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to assessments done without AI assistance.
According to Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, the use of AI has improved both the accuracy and the consistency of doctors’ assessments, leading to greater agreement among them.
Typically, doctors rely on MRI scans to gauge tumor sizes; however, some tumors are not visible on MRIs, as noted by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI can complement the limitations of MRIs.
Brisbane suggested that leveraging AI in cancer treatment has the potential to deliver more effective and personalized patient care, tailoring treatments to individual needs and enhancing their success in combating the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to see such innovations being validated through research and 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 illness. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the US this year, with 35,250 expected fatalities resulting from the disease.