The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the marketing of software to assist medical professionals who examine body tissues (pathologists) in the detection of areas that are suspicious for cancer as an adjunct (supplement) to the review of digitally-scanned slide images from prostate biopsies (tissue removed from the body).
The software, called Paige Prostate, is the first artificial intelligence (AI)-based software designed to identify an area of interest on the prostate biopsy image with the highest likelihood of harboring cancer so it can be reviewed further by the pathologist if the area of concern has not been identified on initial review.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), aside from non-melanoma skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the United States. It is also one of the leading causes of cancer death among men.
Paige Prostate is compatible for use with slide images that have been digitized using a scanner. The digitized slide image can then be visualized using a slide image viewer.
The FDA evaluated data from a clinical study where 16 pathologists examined 527 slide images of prostate biopsies (171 cancer and 356 benign) that were digitized using a scanner. For each slide image, each pathologist completed two assessments, one without Paige Prostate’s assistance (unassisted read) and one with Paige Prostate’s assistance (assisted read).
While the clinical study did not evaluate the impact on final patient diagnosis, which is typically based on multiple biopsies, the study found that Paige Prostate improved detection of cancer on individual slide images by 7.3% on average when compared to pathologists’ unassisted reads for whole slide images of individual biopsies, with no impact on the read of benign slide images.
The FDA granted marketing authorization of the Paige Prostate software to Paige.AI.
