An artificial intelligence healthcare company claims its software can more accurately detect the extent of prostate cancer than doctors.
Avenda Health published a study last month that involved ten physicians, each evaluating 50 different prostate cancer cases. The results showed that Avenda’s Unfold AI software achieved a cancer detection accuracy of 84.7%, compared to the manual detection accuracy of the physicians, which ranged from 67.2% to 75.9%.
Conducted in collaboration with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, the study also highlighted that using AI for cancer contouring led to size predictions that were 45 times more precise and consistent than those made without AI assistance.
Shyam Natarajan, an assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and the senior author of the study, noted that AI assistance improved both the accuracy and consistency of doctors’ assessments, resulting in greater agreement among them.
Typically, doctors rely on MRIs to determine the size of tumors; however, some tumors are not visible through MRI scans. Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, explained that AI can help identify these “MRI-invisible” tumors.
He emphasized that the integration of AI in cancer treatment could lead to more effective, personalized care, allowing for tailored treatments that are more successful in combating the disease. Brisbane remarked that AI has the potential to surpass human capabilities.
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan expressed that it is “empowering for physicians” to see such innovations validated through scientific 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 during their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will succumb to the disease. It is projected that the United States will see 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer this year, with an estimated 35,250 deaths resulting from the illness.