Implementation of Multi-parametric Prostate MRI in Clinical Practice

While initial implementations of prostate MRI suffered from suboptimal performance in tumor detection, technological advances over the past decade have allowed modern multi-parametric prostate MRI (mpMRI) to achieve high diagnostic accuracy for detection, localization, and staging and thereby impact patient management. A particular emerging application of mpMRI is in the pre-biopsy setting to allow for MRI-targeted biopsy, for instance, through real-time MRI/ultrasound fusion, which may help reduce the over-detection of low-risk disease and selectively detect clinically significant cancers, in comparison with use of standard systematic biopsy alone. mpMRI and MRI-targeted biopsy are spreading beyond the large academic centers to increasingly be adopted within small and community practices. Aims of this review article are to summarize the hardware and sequences used for performing mpMRI, explore patient specific technical considerations, delineate approaches for study interpretation and reporting [including the recent American College of Radiology Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) version 2], and describe challenges and implications relating to the widespread clinical implementation of mpMRI.