An AI healthcare company claims its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to human doctors.
Avenda Health recently conducted a study featuring ten doctors who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases. Their AI tool, Unfold, achieved a detection accuracy of 84.7%, whereas the doctors’ manual assessments 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 utilizing AI for cancer contouring led to predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more precise compared to traditional methods.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted that AI assistance enhanced both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ evaluations, resulting in a greater consensus among them.
Typically, doctors rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size, but some tumors are often “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA. He emphasized that AI plays a critical role in identifying what MRIs cannot.
Brisbane further stated that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could lead to more effective and personalized patient care, enabling treatments that are better aligned with individual needs and more successful in combating the illness. He remarked that AI has the potential to “go beyond human ability.”
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to witness this kind of innovation being validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
In the United States, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease, per the American Cancer Society. An estimated 299,010 new prostate cancer cases are forecasted for this year, with 35,250 deaths expected from the illness.