MRI Pre and Post- ablation in Prostate Cancer

The rise in incidence has been due to use of the blood serum test, Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA), as a screening test both formally in the USA and Europe, and informally in the UK. However, PSA is false positive-prone (7 out of 10 men in this category will still not have prostate cancer) and false negative-prone (3 out of 10 men with prostate cancer have no elevation in PSA). If a man has a raised PSA or other risk factors that raise a clinical suspicion of prostate cancer (e.g., family history, abnormal rectal examination, high PSA velocity or density, Black origin) he is offered a transrectal ultrasound guided (TRUS) prostate biopsy. These biopsies traverse the rectal mucosa and take 6-12 biopsies in a systematic fashion throughout the whole prostate, but with no knowledge of suspicious areas within the gland. More than 30,000 men have a prostate biopsy in the UK and over one million biopsies are carried out in the USA.