Specialization
Urology
Focus of research
Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in men and 2500 men die from prostate cancer every year in The Netherlands. In order to diagnose prostate cancer the PSA bloodtest is widely used but suffers from low sensitivity and specificity. This leads to unneccesary invasive testing (prostate biopsy) on the one hand with associated complications in many patients while in over 60% of cases no significant tumor is found on biopsies. On the other hand this test may be omitted unjustified in patients who have a significant malignancy. The key solution to this problem is better imaging. Prostate cancer is poorly visible on imaging although significant progress has been made in recent years using MR scanning. However MR is expensive and over 10% of prostate tumors will be missed. Ideally it would be possible to make a correct diagnosis with imaging only, selecting those who do need a biopsy, or even better being able to justly omit biopsy at all. Together with our collegues at the Technical University Eindhoven we investigate multiparametric ultrasound scanning in the diagnosis of prostate cancer. To date our research shows contrast enhanced ultasound scanning of the prostate is approaching the results of MR scanning. But the field of ultrasound scanning is evolving tremendously resulting in the development of many new parameters. These all have to be tested in clinical setting which we do in AmsterdamUMC and in our clinical partner hospital.