An artificial intelligence healthcare company has claimed that its software can more accurately identify cases of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten physicians who reviewed a total of 50 prostate cancer cases. The results showed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in cancer detection, whereas the accuracy of the doctors ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study also indicated that using AI for cancer contouring significantly improved the precision of size predictions — making them 45 times more accurate and consistent than evaluations done without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA, and the study’s senior author, noted that the integration of AI support made the physicians more precise and fostered greater agreement among them.
Typically, doctors rely on MRI scans to assess tumor sizes. However, some tumors are not detectable via MRI, as explained by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He emphasized that AI technology can fill the gaps where MRIs may fall short.
Brisbane added that the incorporation of AI in cancer treatment has the potential to enhance personalized care, providing treatments that are more closely aligned with individual patient needs and improving success rates against the disease. He remarked that AI capabilities can exceed human limitations.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, stated that seeing such innovations validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association is empowering for physicians.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 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 from the illness.