Kinnaird noted that the MRI-guided prostate biopsy is already a major improvement on the current standard of care in Alberta, called a 12-core transrectal ultrasound-guided biopsy. What that means is we could potentially be saving 16 men from having to undergo this invasive procedure that has serious potential side-effects,” said Kinnaird. The analysis showed that we could safely avoid 16 biopsies out of every 100 at a risk threshold of 20 per cent. “We did a net benefit analysis using this calculator.
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The results showed that the simple, free calculator significantly helped improve patient selection for biopsies. To test the efficacy and accuracy of the calculator, Kinnaird led a study in which 2,354 men undergoing MRI-guided prostate biopsy were examined over 10 years. The combination of the standard-of-care data with MRI data provides two critical benefits: it triages patients to determine whether they truly need the biopsy in the first place, and if they do, it improves the technique so clinicians are better able to find more clinically significant prostate cancer. The risk calculator, called the PCRC-MRI, is the first in North America developed to predict biopsy outcomes in North American men. “Anything we can do before the biopsy to determine whether the patient really needs a biopsy is very important for patient care.” And, there’s a four per cent risk of what’s called post-biopsy sepsis, which can cause patients to end up in the ICU or may even prove fatal,” said Kinnaird, who is also a member of the Cancer Research Institute of Northern Alberta. “Only about 25 to 30 per cent of them may show some prostate cancer, and up to seven per cent of men, after they’ve had a prostate biopsy, end up getting hospitalized within 30 days. However, as Kinnaird explained, these biopsies aren’t always necessary and they come with certain risks. More than one million prostate biopsies are performed in North America every year, and prostate cancer is the most common type of internal cancer in North American men. A new risk calculator developed by a University of Alberta researcher and collaborators in the United States could reduce the number of unnecessary and invasive biopsies for prostate cancer.Īdam Kinnaird, a surgeon and assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, said the tool is available online for free, requires only conventional clinical data paired with data from prostate MRI scans, and targets an unmet clinical need for prostate cancer patients.