An AI healthcare company says its software can detect the scope of prostate cancer more accurately than doctors.
Avenda Health released a study last month that involved ten doctors who each assessed 50 different prostate cancer cases. Avenda’s Unfold AI software detected cancer with 84.7% accuracy, while physicians who tried to detect cancer manually fell between 67.2 percent and 75.9 percent.
The study, done in partnership with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology, also found that by using AI to assist with cancer contouring, predictions of cancer size were 45 times more accurate and consistent with AI than without it.
“We saw the use of AI assistance made doctors both more accurate and more consistent, meaning doctors tended to agree more when using AI assistance,” assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study Shyam Natarajan said in a statement.
Doctors tend to use MRI’s to understand the size of a tumor. Still, some tumors are “MRI-invisible,” said Dr. Wayne Brisbane, an assistant professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. AI helps where MRIs fail.
“Overall, the use of AI in cancer treatment could lead to more effective and personalized care for patients, with treatments that are better tailored to their individual needs and more successful in fighting the disease,” Brisbane said in a statement. Brisbane said AI can “go beyond human ability.”
Avenda Health CEO Dr. Shyam Natarajan said it’s” empowering for physicians to see this kind of innovation being validated through studies and recognized by the AMA.”
In the US, about 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetimes and 1 in 44 men will die of the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.
It is estimated there will be 299,010 new cases of prostate cancer this year in the US and 35,250 will die from the disease.