Novel sampling scheme with reduced cores in men with multiparametric MRI-visible lesions undergoing prostate biopsy

To investigate the effects of various prostate biopsy protocols with reduced cores on the detection of clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) in individuals with MRI-visible lesions (Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System ≥ 3).

A total of 464 patients with MRI-visible lesions were recruited. All patients underwent two or more targeted biopsies (TB) and systematic biopsies (SB). Several hypothetical biopsy schemes were set-up: TB alone, TB+ipsilateral SB, TB+contralateral SB, TB+SB of the targeted sector (TB+t-SB), and TB+SB of the non-targeted sector (TB+n-SB). A subgroup analysis of patients with multiple MRI-visible lesions was performed. The standard of reference was defined as TB+SB. McNemar test was used to compare csPCa detection rates between various sampling schemes.

The detection rates for prostate cancer and csPCa were 72.8% (338 of 464) and 62.1% (288 of 464), respectively. There were 8.0%, 0.3%, 6.3%, 1.0%, and 4.5% cases in which TB alone, TB+ipsilateral SB, TB+contralateral SB, TB+t-SB, and TB+n-SB would have missed csPCa, respectively. All hypothetical schemes, with the exception of TB+contralateral SB (p = 0.063), significantly outperformed TB alone in terms of csPCa detection (p < 0.05). As for the multi-focus cohort, which included 48 cases, none of the non-index lesions had a higher Gleason grade than the index lesions within the same patients.

TB+ipsilateral SB might be the optimal biopsy scheme for detecting csPCa. As for the multi-focus cohort, the biopsy of the non-index lesions provided limited pathological information.