Clinical research fellow, Dr. Joana Neves, was granted the Best Poster Award for her research “Combining mpMRI sequences for the diagnosis of prostate cancer – the value of adding diffusion and contrast enhancement to T2W on 3Tesla: Outcomes from the PICTURE trial” during the 5th Meeting of the EAU Section of Urological Imaging.
“Whilst we’re moving towards a diagnostic pathway where MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) comes first, there are still plenty of men who undergo transrectal biopsies before they have MRI. I think the results of this research definitely show that MRI has value in risk stratifying patients after TRUS (transrectal ultrasonography) biopsy. I think we need to question whether these results are applicable to other patients and to determine which sequence should we use in this setting,” explained Neves.
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Her research began when Neves was still at the University College London. “Our centre has been working with MRI for a long time and we thought it would be worth to look at the value of each sequence in a pragmatic way. We know that radiologists usually look at the anatomical sequences and then the functional sequences. We wanted to see the impact of adding all of that to the initial evaluation,” stated Neves.
When asked if there would be a follow-up research, Neves replied, “The PROMIS (Prostate MR imaging study) is done with MRI as a first-line test after the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test. There is the same sequential reporting and it will probably give us a better sense of how to translate these results into a first-line setting with MRI.”
