An AI healthcare firm claims that its software can more accurately identify the extent of prostate cancer compared to medical professionals.
Avenda Health released a recent study involving ten doctors who evaluated 50 prostate cancer cases each. The company’s Unfold AI software achieved an accuracy of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the doctors’ manual assessments ranged from 67.2% to 75.9% accuracy.
Conducted in partnership with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, the study also demonstrated that AI-assisted cancer contouring predictions for tumor size were 45 times more accurate and consistent than without AI.
According to Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study, the AI assistance made doctors not only more accurate but also more consistent in their assessments, with greater agreement among physicians.
Doctors typically rely on MRIs to gauge tumor size; however, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” noted Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He emphasized that AI can assist where MRIs fall short.
“Utilizing AI in cancer treatment could enable more effective and tailored care for patients, allowing treatments to be customized to individual needs and improving success rates against the disease,” Brisbane stated. He added that AI has the potential to transcend human capabilities.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that it is “empowering for physicians to see this type of innovation validated through studies and recognized by the AMA.”
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in 8 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. It is expected that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer cases in the US this year, with 35,250 fatalities resulting from the illness.