An AI healthcare company claims its software can detect prostate cancer more accurately than traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health shared findings from a study last month that involved ten doctors evaluating 50 prostate cancer cases each. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the physicians’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, the study revealed that when AI was used to assist in contouring tumors, the predictions of cancer size were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to traditional methods.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted, “The use of AI assistance made doctors both more accurate and more consistent, leading physicians to have greater agreement when assisted by AI.”
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to understand tumor size; however, Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, emphasized that some tumors remain “MRI-invisible.” He stated that AI can provide critical assistance in these instances.
“Overall, the use of AI in cancer treatment could lead to more effective and personalized care for patients, with treatments better tailored to their individual needs and more successful in fighting the disease,” Brisbane said, adding that AI could “go beyond human ability.”
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is empowering for physicians to see such innovation validated through studies and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately one in eight men will receive a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, and one 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, with an estimated 35,250 deaths resulting from the disease.