The Role of Magnetic Resonance in Prostate Cancer Diagnosis, Characterization and Treatment

One in six men will be affected by prostate cancer in their life time. Prostate cancer can be slow or fast growing and it affects mainly men over fifty. Current options for treatments are surgery, radiation, hormone therapy, immunotherapy, chemotherapy and active surveillance. Magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy is a non-invasive, sensitive, and non-radioactive way to detect, characterize and understand the anatomy, physiology and metabolism of a tumor. MRI provides high image resolution that depicts the zonal anatomy of the prostate and cancer in areas that may have been missed by a biopsy. The field of MRI/MRS is constantly evolving toward new emerging techniques that can provide higher accuracy and sensitivity for cancer detection as well as treatment planning.