An artificial intelligence healthcare company has reported that its software is capable of detecting the extent of prostate cancer more effectively than medical professionals.
Avenda Health shared results from a recent study featuring ten doctors who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The company’s Unfold AI software demonstrated an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the doctors’ manual assessments varied between 67.2% and 75.9%.
The study was conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology. It revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring yielded predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to human assessments alone.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, emphasized that the integration of AI assistance not only enhanced the accuracy of doctors but also led to greater consensus in their evaluations.
Typically, doctors rely on MRI scans to determine tumor size, but some tumors remain “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He noted that AI technology provides solutions where MRIs may fall short.
Brisbane stated that the application of AI in cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, allowing treatments to be more finely tuned to individual needs, ultimately leading to improved success rates in combating the disease. He affirmed that AI can “go beyond human ability.”
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed his appreciation for the validation of such innovations through research and recognition by 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 in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men succumbing to the disease. This year, it is estimated that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the United States, with 35,250 expected fatalities.