Dr. Leonardo Kayat Bittencourt on limitations of prostate MRI

In this video, Leonardo Kayat Bittencourt, MD, PhD, discusses limitations of prostate MRI. Bittencourt is vice chair of innovation in the department of radiology at UH Cleveland Medical Center, a radiologist in abdominal imaging at UH Cleveland Medical Center, associate professor of radiology at Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine, and a member of the Cancer Imaging Program at Case Comprehensive Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Transcription:

What are some limitations of prostate MRI?

First of all, there are the patient limitations. There are patients who are not able to be submitted to an MRI due to metallic artifacts or to some conditions that are not compatible with the performance of an MRI. Also, the exam can take anything between 15 to 40 minutes depending on the protocol of the institution. It's an exam that requires that the patient stays still and that we control some quality factors such as bowel motion, respiratory motion, and bowel preparation. There are a number of factors that will affect the image quality, the diagnostic quality of the exam, and the overall performance. This is a lot on the patient side. Of course, on the technical side, you have to have well-trained technicians and radiologists and good scanners that are able to perform the exam at the top of their game. Everything is well considered and is well performed. There are known limitations to MRI. Some of them are related to the biology of cancer. There are some appearances and configurations of prostate cancer that are thankfully less common, but that may appear as MRI-invisible lesions depending on the volume, depending on the distribution on the cellularity on the patterns of cancer growth. But the vast majority of clinically significant cancers of a certain size will be expected to be visualized on MRI.

This transcription was edited for clarity.