Urologist discusses collaborating with nuclear medicine when using PSMA-PET for prostate cancer

In this video, Edward M. Schaeffer, MD, PhD, discusses collaboration with nuclear medicine specialists when using PSMA-PET agents in prostate cancer. Schaeffer is chair and Harold Binstein Professor of Urology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.

Transcription:

Could you discuss any personal experience you have had collaborating with nuclear medicine specialists or radiation oncologists regarding PSMA-PET and patient management?

At Northwestern Medicine, we have very extensive and very deep experience with PET-PSMA-based imaging. We started our first randomized trial with PET-based imaging in 2017, and so our nuclear medicine physicians have tremendous experience reading these kinds of PET scans, and it certainly requires a high degree of experience to interpret them. There can be some false positives that you could maybe overcall. And so it's important to just understand where the prostate-specific PET scan also lights up; classic would be salivary gland; dorsal root ganglia is another. And so just having a understanding of what is a false positive, because these areas of the body light up vs not is really, really important. We have a really tremendous environment here and our nuclear medicine physicians have really deep experience with these tools, because we've been using them here so long. Whenever we have outside PET imaging, we often will have that re-reviewed at our oncology conference or tumor board, just to level set and make sure that we understand the reading to be as it's stated in the report.

This transcription was edited for clarity.