In his own words, Dr. Michael A. Geffin discusses UroNav fusion biopsy for prostate cancer. You can also watch the video below—he discusses everything at the 1:30 mark. (We've lightly edited the transcript for readability.)
As with all content on Greater Boston Urology's blog, the following information is educational in nature, not medical advice. Always talk to your physician about your specific health care questions and conditions.
[Editor's note: This article was reviewed and updated on 7/21/21 with additional links.]
"We were the first group in Massachusetts to have a fusion biopsy machine back in 2011. We've upgraded that machine and have done over 250 patients. Fusion biopsy is when someone has had screening tests showing that they are likely or have a high risk of having prostate cancer.
The problem with biopsying prostates is that it's done under ultrasound guidance. The technology of ultrasound is not good at seeing lesions, so we generally use ultrasound to guide us to the different zones of the prostate to do a sampling biopsy.
The MRI will see lesions—it's fairly good at that. What we can do, is we can take the MRI images and fuse them with ultrasound images so that during the procedure, as we're moving the ultrasound probe, we're actually looking at the target of the MRI and we can put a needle directly in that.
We see patients coming to us from Maine, New Hampshire, and western Massachusetts who were referred for this as we have become pretty much the go-to urology group for this procedure within Massachusetts and in New England."