UK’s National Health Service to trial mpMRI for prostate cancer

Patient being positioned for an MRI – image used under
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CANCER DIGEST – March 10, 2018 –In an effort to improve and speed up prostate cancer diagnosis, Britain’s National Health Service has launched a trial of a "one-stop" service in three west London hospitals. The goal is to complete all the tests needed to tell a man whether or not he has prostate cancer in one day.

The trial relies on a new type of MRI scan called mpMRI, which provides higher quality imaging that provides an answer by itself in up to 40 percent of men on the same day. For the other men with
suspicious but indeterminate lesions will undergo a biopsy guided by ultrasound and 3D MRI scans that show more precisely where to target the biopsy needle.

Currently getting a definitive diagnosis of prostate cancer can take weeks, requiring a MRI scan one day, scheduling a biopsy some time later, in which dozens of tissues samples are taken and sent to a pathologist for analysis. Sometimes more than one biopsy procedure is needed requiring multiple hospital visits.

While MRI is expensive, the new mpMRI technology uses multiple parameters that produce data about a suspicious lesion that allows doctors to judge whether a tumor is a clinically significant high-risk cancer or a relatively low-risk tumor that can be safely monitored. Eliminating the need for biopsy in the 40 percent of men with low-risk lesions makes the mpMRI approach cost-effective.

Imperial College London chairman of urology Professor Hashim Ahmed told the BBC the trial is expected to improve prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment.

"Fast access to high-quality prostate MRI allows many men to avoid invasive biopsies as well as allowing precision biopsy in those men requiring it to find high risk tumors much earlier," he told the BBC. "What we are hoping to do is show the NHS that this can be done, that it can be done cost-effectively and that we can improve the outcomes for men in a much better way than we were doing."