- The prostrate gland sits in a difficult location,
and it's a soft organ.
It's not like the skull where it's surrounded
by a boney structure and you can pick sort of points
and triangulate very well because it's not moving.
The prostrate squishes.
It rotates.
It kind of moves all over in the pelvis,
so it's a very difficult thing to biopsy.
The normal ultrasound just kind of tells you
where the prostrate is,
so we're using it just to make sure
that we put needles in the prostrate
and not somewhere else in the pelvis.
The MRI allows us to look inside the prostrate
for different lesions.
- Both the MR image and the ultrasound
show very different visualizations of the anatomy.
The challenge is trying to map those two together,
those two images.
- [Dr. Sprenkle] With the addition
of MR-Ultrasound Fusion targeted biopsies,
we're able to much more accurately pinpoint
those areas that are concerning.
- [Dr. Onofrey] The value of merging these two image
modalities is to provide accurate biopsy guidance.
- [Dr. Sprenkle] That overlapping of fusion technology
sounds pretty simple, but it's actually quite complicated
for several reasons.
One of the main ones is that the prostrate
is deformable, so one of the things
that we're actually doing in our research here
is trying to predict how the prostrate is going to move
by understanding how it has moved in the past,
and so that we can make sure that we're actually
at the lesion and not a few millimeters away from it.
- [Dr. Onofrey] We've learned from hundreds of cases
that have come prior to this
and with some manual training coming from Dr. Sprenkle,
we're able to learn how the prostrate will actually deform
during this procedure and so we use that to guide
the fusion of these two modalities in a constrained way.
- As soon as I start talking to these men
about a prostrate biopsy, having a prostrate biopsy,
sort of empathizing with their discomfort
with the idea of having an ultrasound probe in their rectum
and a needle getting passed into their prostrate,
it becomes clear that we want to do better than that.
By being able to improve our Ultrasound-MR Fusion
and being able to model the prostrate,
we can improve our biopsy technique,
so instead of potentially having to do 17 biopsies
to collect all the tissue, we can do one.
- [Dr. Onofrey] It's extremely fulfilling to actually see
these algorithms come out of the lab.
It's a great example of translational research,
bringing AI machine-learning techniques
into the clinic where we could directly improve
patient experience and hopefully improve
the diagnosis of prostrate cancer.