A healthcare technology company has claimed that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health published a study last month that involved ten physicians evaluating 50 different prostate cancer cases each. The study found that Avenda’s Unfold AI software identified cancer with an accuracy of 84.7%, while the accuracy of 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 research demonstrated that the integration of AI for cancer contouring significantly improved the accuracy of predictions regarding tumor size, achieving 45 times more precision compared to evaluations 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 utilizing AI assistance not only enhanced doctors’ accuracy but also led to greater agreement among them in their evaluations.
Traditionally, doctors rely on MRI scans to gauge tumor size; however, some tumors can be “MRI-invisible,” as explained by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In such cases, AI becomes a crucial tool where MRIs may fall short.
Dr. Brisbane emphasized that the use of AI in cancer treatment holds the potential for more effective and personalized patient care, allowing for treatments that better align with individual patient needs and improve success rates against the disease. He expressed that AI can surpass human capabilities in certain assessments.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, highlighted the significance of this innovative technology being validated through comprehensive studies and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the US will face a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men ultimately succumbing to the disease.
For the year 2023, it is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the US, with an estimated 35,250 deaths resulting from the illness.