An AI healthcare company has announced that its software can more accurately determine the extent of prostate cancer compared to medical professionals.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten doctors who each evaluated 50 cases of prostate cancer. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the physicians’ manual evaluations ranged between 67.2% and 75.9%.
This research, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, found that utilizing AI for cancer contouring resulted in predictions about tumor size being 45 times more accurate than traditional methods.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, assistant professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, noted that incorporating AI assistance enhanced both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ assessments.
Traditionally, doctors rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size; however, some tumors remain “MRI-invisible.” Dr. Wayne Brisbane, also an assistant professor of urology at UCLA, emphasized that AI fills this gap effectively.
Brisbane stated that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could enable more personalized care, with therapies tailored to individual patient needs, thereby improving treatment outcomes. He mentioned that AI has the capacity to surpass human capabilities.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Natarajan, expressed that the validation of such innovations through research and acknowledgment by the American Medical Association is empowering for healthcare professionals.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the United States will receive a prostate cancer diagnosis during their lifetime, and 1 in 44 will succumb to the disease. The organization estimates there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the U.S. this year, with 35,250 fatalities resulting from it.