Fusion guided biopsy can help with accurate diagnosis of prostate cancer

Sep 14 2017

There is a new technology available that can help with both predicting prostate cancer aggressiveness and detecting prostate cancer. It's called fusion guided biopsy, and Valley–Mount Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Care is proud to offer the UroNav Fusion Biopsy System to its patients as an outpatient procedure.

"This targeted MRI/ultrasound biopsy is poised to become a new standard in prostate cancer screening," explains Howard Frey, M.D., Medical Director, The Urologic Oncology Center, Valley-Mount Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Care. "The advanced technology will help us to more accurately diagnosis prostate cancer, which is the most common cancer among men after skin cancer."

The UroNav Fusion Biopsy System fuses pre-biopsy MRI images of the prostate with ultrasound-guided biopsy images in real time to target suspicious areas for biopsy. This allows for a much more effective and precise prostate biopsy than the standard biopsy. "Prostate cancer can be hard to detect, because patients often do not have symptoms at the time of diagnosis. Deciding what to do about prostate cancer can be challenging, continues Dr. Frey. "It is important to distinguish between aggressive, potentially lethal prostate tumors, and those that are indolent and not life-threatening."

In a standard biopsy, the tissue sampling is done via ultrasound, but there are no targeted areas. This can pose an issue if the prostate is enlarged because random sampling without a target can miss an aggressive tumor, but find inconsequential non-aggressive prostate cancer that does not require treatment.

Fusion Biopsy greatly improves on the standard technique. First, a prostate MRI is obtained. If a suspicious area is identified, the result is fused with the live prostate ultrasound providing a target to biopsy. Thus a directed biopsy is obtained and is more likely to show an intermediate to aggressive cancer. The biopsy results are then utilized to guide patients in selecting an appropriate treatment modality.