A healthcare technology company has announced that its software is capable of more accurately detecting the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by physicians.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten doctors who each evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the doctors’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9% accuracy.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study highlighted that AI-assisted cancer contouring predictions were 45 times more precise and consistent than assessments made without AI.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the lead author of the study, stated that the integration of AI assistance resulted in greater accuracy and consistency, leading to increased agreement among doctors’ assessments.
Typically, doctors rely on MRIs to determine tumor size, but some tumors do not appear on these scans, according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He emphasized that AI could identify what MRIs cannot.
Brisbane remarked that utilizing AI in cancer treatment could enhance the effectiveness and personalization of care, enabling treatments that are more closely aligned with individual patient needs and improving outcomes in combating the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that the validation of such innovations through research and recognition 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. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the United States this year, leading to an estimated 35,250 deaths from the illness.