An artificial intelligence healthcare company has announced that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study last month involving ten physicians, each examining 50 different prostate cancer cases. The findings revealed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software identified cancer with an accuracy rate of 84.7%, while doctors manually diagnosing cancer achieved accuracy rates ranging from 67.2% to 75.9%.
This research, conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also showed that using AI for cancer contouring significantly increased the precision of cancer size predictions, making them 45 times more accurate and consistent than those produced without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study, stated that AI support not only enhanced doctors’ accuracy but also improved their consistency, leading to greater agreement among physicians using AI tools.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size; however, some tumors can be “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI technology fills the gaps where MRIs fall short.
Brisbane further explained that integrating AI into cancer treatment could provide more effective and personalized care, tailoring treatments to the unique needs of patients and improving success rates in combating the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, noted that it is encouraging for doctors to witness this kind of innovation validated by research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lives, while 1 in 44 men are expected to succumb to the disease. This year alone, it is projected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the US, with 35,250 fatalities.