Michael Cookson, MD, on challenges with PSMA-PET imaging

In this interview, Michael S. Cookson, MD, MMHC, FACS, touches on some of the current limitations of PSMA-PET imaging in prostate cancer. Cookson, who is a professor and the Donald D. Albers Endowed Chair in Urology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, is a co–editor in chief for Urology Times.

Video Transcript:

I think having the ability to monitor patients with imaging and using things like PSMA-PET is good, but yet we're we sometimes have pitfalls with PSMA-PET too. Patients can sometimes have false positives. Not everything that's small and shows up on a PSMA-PET is definitely metastatic disease, and some of these particularly low volume areas can be challenging to even get a diagnosis. An example would be a small isolated rib lesion that can also be a false positive. There's benign bone diseases such as Paget's disease, that can also show up in the pelvic area, for example, and lead to over-diagnosis of advanced cancer. So, you have to interpret it, of course, appropriately. But PSMA imaging is being used for staging patients with newly diagnosed advanced, high-risk disease, for locally advanced disease, for metastatic disease, and it's also being used in the monitoring. Then if you get further down the road with castration resistant cancer, and it can be used as the entry to deciding whether or not they be candidates for PLUVICTO, so theranostics. That's evolving too. So, it's an exciting time, and the imaging is really helpful, but it also needs to be interpreted, and then it can also be used in the treatment. There's a lot of ways in which we're learning to use it.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.