An artificial intelligence healthcare company has announced that its software can more accurately assess the extent of prostate cancer compared to doctors.
Avenda Health conducted a study last month involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 different prostate cancer cases. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, significantly outperforming the manual assessments by doctors, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
This study, executed in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also highlighted that AI-assisted cancer contouring resulted in predictions of tumor size that were 45 times more accurate and consistent than those made without AI assistance.
According to Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the study’s senior author, the integration of AI led to increased accuracy and consistency among doctors, fostering greater agreement in their diagnoses.
In the current practice, doctors rely on MRIs to determine tumor size; however, some tumors are not visible on these scans, as noted by Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He emphasized that AI fills the gaps where MRIs do not provide adequate information.
Dr. Brisbane also indicated that AI’s application in cancer treatment could result in more effective and personalized patient care, enabling treatments that are better aligned with patients’ specific needs and improving the likelihood of successful outcomes against the disease.
Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that it is encouraging for physicians to see such innovations validated through research and acknowledged by the American Medical Association.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 1 in 44 men expected to succumb to the illness. Projections for this year estimate around 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S., leading to approximately 35,250 deaths from the disease.