An AI healthcare company claims its software can detect the extent of prostate cancer more accurately than doctors.
Avenda Health recently released a study involving ten doctors who each assessed 50 different prostate cancer cases. According to the research, Avenda’s Unfold AI software detected cancer with 84.7% accuracy, whereas physicians who attempted to detect cancer manually had accuracy rates between 67.2% and 75.9%.
This study, conducted in partnership with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also discovered that using AI for cancer contouring significantly improved predictions of cancer size, making them 45 times more accurate and consistent than without AI assistance.
“We observed that AI assistance made doctors both more accurate and more consistent, meaning doctors tended to agree more when using AI assistance,” stated Shyam Natarajan, assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA, and the senior author of the study.
MRI scans are typically used by doctors to determine the size of a tumor. However, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” according to Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. AI can provide assistance where MRIs fall short.
“Overall, using AI in cancer treatment could lead to more effective and personalized care for patients, with treatments better tailored to their individual needs and more successful in combating the disease,” Brisbane said. He added that AI has the potential to “go beyond human ability.”
Dr. Shyam Natarajan, CEO of Avenda Health, remarked that it is “empowering for physicians to see this kind of innovation being validated through studies and recognized by the AMA.”
In the United States, approximately 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime, and 1 in 44 men will die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.
It is projected that there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer this year in the US and that 35,250 individuals will die from the disease.