Avenda Health, an AI healthcare company creating the future of personalised prostate cancer care, announces new study results showing its cancer mapping tool, Unfold AI, predicts cancer spread more accurately than MRI.
The results show that Unfold AI significantly improves prediction of seminal vesicle invasion (SVI), a critical factor in prostate cancer staging and prognosis, achieving a 92% accuracy rate, compared to 52% with radiologist interpretation on standard MRI.
This data builds on a previous study which examined Unfold AI’s ability to predict extracapsular extension risk and was named winner of the BJUI Compass Prize 2025 at the American Urological Association’s Annual Meeting. Together, these studies demonstrate the powerful role of Unfold AI in predicting the spread of prostate cancer to other organs, improving physicians’ ability to accurately diagnose and plan treatment for patients.
Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine and UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine conducted a preliminary study of two cohorts of men, all of whom received MRI scans before undergoing prostate cancer surgery. They compared physicians’ predictions of SVI based on MRI alone to predictions made by Unfold AI, which combines MRI and clinical data to create a 3D cancer map. After surgery, the team analysed prostate specimens for SVI to determine ground-truth and evaluate the accuracy of both methods.
In the first cohort, pathology confirmed SVI in 25 of 147 patients. Unfold AI accurately identified 92% of these cases, while physicians using MRI identified 52%. The second cohort included 20 patients, 10 of which had SVI. MRI missed four of the 10 cases, while Unfold AI missed only two. Unfold AI also produced fewer false positive rates compared to MRI in both the first (AUC 0.95 vs. 0.80, p = 0.003) and second cohorts (AUC 0.85 vs 0.74).
“These results demonstrate how Unfold AI continues to improve the diagnosis and staging of prostate cancer, enabling the physician to recommend and deliver the best therapy to the patient,” said study author Shyam Natarajan, PhD, Co-founder and CEO of Avenda Health. “We are honoured to be at the forefront of providing AI tools to urologists that improve the lives of patients.”
