Avenda Health, an AI healthcare company, claims that its software can detect the extent of prostate cancer with greater accuracy than traditional methods employed by doctors.
In a recent study involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 different cases of prostate cancer, Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7%. In contrast, the doctors’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, the study demonstrated that utilizing AI for cancer contouring yielded predictions for tumor size that were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to manual assessments.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted that AI assistance improved both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ evaluations, leading to greater agreement among them when using the technology.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size, but some tumors can be “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI can address the limitations of MRI technology.
Brisbane also stated that the integration of AI in cancer treatment has the potential to facilitate more effective and personalized patient care, enabling treatments to be tailored to individual needs and enhancing the chances of successfully combating the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed optimism about the validation of their innovation through research, highlighting its recognition by 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 in their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. This year, it is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S., with 35,250 deaths attributed to the disease.