A healthcare technology company has announced that its software can more accurately detect the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health published a study last month involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases each. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while doctors who relied on manual assessments varied in accuracy from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and reported in the Journal of Urology, the study revealed that the integration of AI in cancer contouring improved predictions of cancer size by a factor of 45 compared to manual assessments.
Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, stated that AI assistance significantly enhanced both the accuracy and consistency of doctor evaluations, leading to greater agreement among physicians when using AI.
Typically, doctors utilize MRI scans to gauge tumor size, but some tumors remain “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He noted that AI technology addresses these limitations.
Brisbane emphasized that incorporating AI into cancer treatment has the potential to enhance personalized care for patients, ensuring treatments are more customized and effective in combating the disease. He remarked that AI can surpass human capabilities.
Avenda Health’s CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed confidence in the innovation being validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association (AMA).
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will face a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, with a mortality rate of about 1 in 44 men from the disease. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S. this year, resulting in 35,250 fatalities.