Avenda Health, an AI healthcare company, has announced that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to traditional methods used by doctors. In a recent study involving ten physicians evaluating 50 prostate cancer cases each, Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7%. In contrast, 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 highlighted that AI-assisted cancer contouring produced predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more accurate and consistent than those made without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and a senior author of the study, noted that AI assistance improved both the accuracy and consistency of diagnoses, leading to greater agreement among doctors when using the technology.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size, but 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 can help address these limitations of MRI.
“Utilizing AI in cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, allowing for treatments that are better suited to individual needs and more successful in combatting the disease,” Brisbane remarked, adding that AI has the capability to surpass human capabilities.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to see such innovations validated through studies and recognized by the American Medical Association (AMA).
Statistics from the American Cancer Society indicate that approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men expected to succumb to the disease. The organization projects that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the US this year, with 35,250 fatalities attributed to the disease.