An AI healthcare company has announced that its software can more accurately determine the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods employed by doctors.
Avenda Health recently published a study involving ten physicians, each evaluating 50 different prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the manual assessments by the doctors ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study also highlighted that AI-assisted cancer contouring significantly improved the accuracy of predicting tumor size, making it 45 times more consistent compared to assessments without AI support.
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study, stated that the incorporation of AI assistance improved both the accuracy and consistency of the doctors’ evaluations, leading to greater agreement among them.
According to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA, doctors typically rely on MRIs to assess tumor size, but some tumors can be “MRI-invisible.” He emphasized that AI can provide valuable insights where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane remarked that utilizing AI in cancer treatment may enhance personalized care for patients, allowing for more tailored and effective treatment strategies. He noted that AI has the potential to “go beyond human ability.”
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to witness this form of innovation being validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
In the United States, approximately one in eight men will receive a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, with one in 44 men succumbing to the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. This year, it is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S., leading to an estimated 35,250 deaths.