A clinical prostate biopsy dataset with undetected cancer

Prostate cancer is a heterogeneous disease showing variability both among individuals and within a patient. While most cases are indolent, aggressive tumors require early intervention. Accurately predicting tumor behavior is challenging, contributing to overdiagnosis but also undertreatment. Current imaging methods may miss the most malignant areas, leading to biopsies often capturing non-malignant prostate tissue even if cancer is present elsewhere in the organ. This non-malignant tissue, however, holds potential as a source for novel diagnostic and prognostic markers. Our clinical dataset comprises men with raised prostate-specific antigen but whose initial prostate needle biopsies only contained benign tissue. Half of the paired patients remained cancer-free for over eight years, while the others were diagnosed with prostate cancer within 30 months of follow-up. We share these initial benign biopsies to enable the exploration of morphological changes in non-malignant tissue and the potential for improved diagnostic accuracy in the early identification of patients with prostate cancer.