A healthcare technology company has announced that its software can more accurately identify the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional doctor assessments.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten physicians, each reviewing 50 prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the accuracy of the physicians ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study revealed that AI assistance significantly improved the accuracy and consistency of cancer size predictions, making them 45 times more reliable with AI than without.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted that the incorporation of AI in assessments led to greater consistency among doctors, enabling them to achieve more agreement in their evaluations.
While doctors generally rely on MRIs to determine tumor sizes, some tumors can be “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI fills the gaps where MRI imaging falls short.
“The overall incorporation of AI in cancer treatment could facilitate more effective and personalized patient care, tailoring treatments to individual needs more successfully,” added Brisbane. He remarked that AI technology has the potential to surpass human capabilities.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, stated that the validation of such innovative technologies through studies like this is empowering for physicians and has garnered recognition from the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lives, with a 1 in 44 chance of dying from the illness. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S. this year, leading to an estimated 35,250 fatalities.