The role of magnetic resonance imaging in prostate cancer imaging and staging

MRI of the prostate can be used to address several of the clinical issues associated with diagnosing and treating prostate cancer. We have found dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCEMRI) to be valuable tool in visualizing and characterizing malignancies. Our approach is based on the three-time point method (3TP), which is a simplified model based method for analyzing DCEMRI of the prostate. This method is a high-spatial, low temporal resolution approach. We have found that this approach can be combined with more conventional MRI methods to give highly accurate staging of prostate cancer. An unanticipated clinical benefit has been the ability to use DCEMRI to image men with elevated PSA and repeat negative biopsy. We have also used a model independent approach based on principal component analysis (PCA) to analyze the DCEMRI datasets.