The role of artificial intelligence in advancing urologic care: From diagnostics to therapeutics
Sina Samenezhad, Dorna Rafighi
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually altering urology by improving diagnostic precision, prognostic evaluation, and therapy decisions in a broad spectrum of urologic diseases. Utilizing machine learning, deep learning, and radiomics, applications of AI have exhibited promise in enhancing cancer identification, stratification, and therapy response prediction, especially in prostate, bladder, and kidney cancers. Beyond cancer therapy, AI enables individually tailored care for benign diseases like benign prostatic hyperplasia, urolithiasis, Functional Urology even in pediatrics by enhancing diagnostic ability and outcome prediction. Heterogeneity of data, model explainability, ethical issues, and lack of prospective validation constrain incorporation into everyday practice. This review summarizes current applications and discusses methodological and ethical limitation, and defines future directions toward enhancing multidisciplinary interaction, standardization across datasets, and prudent implementation. Eventually, AI provides large-scale opportunity to transform urologic care by facilitating individually tailored, expedient, and equitable patient care.