An artificial intelligence healthcare company claims that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to doctors.
Avenda Health published a study last month involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 various prostate cancer cases. Their Unfold AI software achieved a cancer detection accuracy of 84.7%, whereas the 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 utilizing AI for cancer contouring resulted in predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more precise and consistent than predictions made without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted that AI assistance not only increased the accuracy of the doctors but also enhanced their consistency, leading to greater agreement among them.
Typically, doctors rely on MRIs to determine tumor size. However, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He stated that AI is beneficial where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane emphasized that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could facilitate more effective and personalized patient care, enabling treatments that are specifically tailored to individual requirements and more effective against the disease. He remarked that AI has the potential to “go beyond human ability.”
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is inspiring for physicians to witness such innovations gaining validation through research and acknowledgment from the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, about 1 in 8 men in the U.S. are diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men succumbing to the illness. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S. this year, with an estimated 35,250 deaths due to the disease.