AI vs. Doctors: Who Wins in Prostate Cancer Detection?

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An AI healthcare company has claimed that its software is capable of detecting the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than traditional methods employed by doctors.

Avenda Health published a study last month involving ten physicians who evaluated 50 different cases of prostate cancer each. The company’s Unfold AI technology achieved an accuracy rate of 84.7% in detecting cancer, while the doctors’ manual evaluations ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.

Conducted in partnership with UCLA Health and featured in the Journal of Urology, the study further revealed that AI-assisted cancer contouring predictions were 45 times more precise and consistent compared to manual assessments.

According to Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology and the senior author of the study, the integration of AI not only enhances the accuracy of diagnoses but also improves consistency among doctors when using AI assistance.

Despite doctors typically relying on MRIs to gauge tumor sizes, Dr. Wayne Brisbane, assistant professor of urology at UCLA, noted that some tumors can be “MRI-invisible.” He explained that AI can help identify these challenging cases.

Brisbane emphasized that AI’s role in cancer treatment has the potential to lead to more effective and customized patient care, tailoring treatments to individual needs and improving success rates against the disease. He remarked that AI can “go beyond human ability.”

Avenda Health’s CEO, Dr. Shyam Natarajan, expressed that it is “empowering for physicians to see this kind of innovation being validated through studies and recognized by the AMA.”

Statistics from the American Cancer Society indicate that approximately 1 in 8 men in the US will receive a prostate cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, with around 1 in 44 men succumbing to the illness. The organization estimates that there will be 299,010 new prostate cancer diagnoses this year, leading to 35,250 deaths from the disease.

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