Next steps for prostate cancer nomograms utilizing serum biomarkers and MRI

In this video, Eric Li, MD, and Rashid Siddiqui, MD, discuss next steps following the recent Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases paper, “Optimizing detection of clinically significant prostate cancer through nomograms incorporating MRI, clinical features, and advanced serum biomarkers in biopsy naïve men.” Siddiqui and Li are urology residents at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.

Transcription:

Li: First of all, the thing that we did to make this more clinically applicable is we made an online risk calculator, which is actually in the publication. And so you can type in the variables for your patient and get a point estimate. It's also nice, because we have 6 different versions of the nomogram, so depending on what variables you have available, it will automatically update. That's actually already online and ready to use, if anyone would like to try it in their clinical practice. Many of the urologists here at Northwestern are using it to counsel patients. In terms of next steps, we are collaborating with other institutions, particularly those who have access to prostate health index or free PSA, to see how our model performs in their patient populations. We're also working with the Northwestern Epic team to try to integrate the nomograms into our medical record. Both of these efforts are already underway.

Siddiqui: I think one of the more long-term goals would be, at the end of the day, we just want to see whether this changes people's practices and whether they found it to be helpful. Right now, physicians have to go online, click on the link, and put in the numbers manually, but our goal is for all this to be automated, and we want to see how this changes management downstream and how it impacts our biopsy outcomes. Those would be the next steps. That would probably take about a year or two, I think, for it to mature, because it will take a little bit for the system to get integrated.

This transcription was edited for clarity.