Prostate cancer is extremely common and demonstrates a tremendous range of biologic aggressiveness and varying responses to therapy. Current diagnostic tools are limited in their ability to detect and characterize prostate cancer within the gland, as well as for local and distant metastases. Accurate radiological assessment remains a major problem in treating individual prostate cancer patients and for monitoring clinical trials of emerging therapies. Recently, new MR metabolic, perfusion and diffusion MRI techniques have been investigated to address this pressing clinical need. These studies have, however, been limited by the performance of conventional 1.5 Tesla MR scanners and non-optimal techniques for prostate cancer imaging. The goal of this Bioengineering Research Partnership (BRP) is to develop, test and translate into the clinical setting new 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging methods that are aimed ultimately to improve radiological monitoring of prostate cancer patients. The goal is to develop new MR imaging techniques to improve the noninvasive assessment of prostate cancer presence, extent, metabolism, perfusion, and lymph node involvement. Preliminary results have shown dramatic improvements are feasible with the new techniques which may represent major advances in prostate cancer imaging. Following the technique development and optimization in initial patient studies, quantitative performance testing of the new prostate MR imaging methods will be conducted. The goal is to determine the improvements over current techniques and to obtain the initial preliminary data and experience required for the design of future clinical trials of the proposed methods. This partnership will combine the efforts of MR imaging scientists from UCSF (Drs. Vigneron, Kurhanewicz, Nelson and Henry), and Stanford (Drs. Pauly, Cunningham) with industry collaborators from two companies, GE Medical Systems and Cytogen Corporation, that have major interests in prostate cancer imaging. The groups in this partnership have extensive bioengineering experience in the development of biomedical imaging techniques in general and specifically in prostate cancer MR imaging. The industry partners will assist in the technical developments and are required for the translation of the new imaging techniques into commercially available tools that can be widely disseminated to allow their use in research and ultimately clinical investigations world-wide. ? ? ?
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