An AI healthcare firm claims that its software can more accurately determine the extent of prostate cancer compared to doctors.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved a detection accuracy of 84.7%, whereas the physicians’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study revealed that when AI assisted in cancer contouring, predictions regarding tumor size were 45 times more accurate and consistent compared to manual methods.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the senior author of the study, noted that AI assistance improved both the precision and consistency of doctors’ assessments, leading to greater agreement among them.
Typically, doctors rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size, but some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” explained Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He highlighted that AI technology addresses the limitations of MRIs.
Brisbane emphasized that integrating AI in cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, allowing for treatments that better match individual needs and enhance success rates against the disease, stating that AI can “go beyond human ability.”
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to see innovative solutions validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the U.S. will face a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men succumbing to the disease. It is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S. this year, with 35,250 fatalities.