Healthcare costs are rising, placing a burden on patients and providers alike. Hospitals and medical centers must find ways to spend less without compromising excellence in clinical care. It’s important to understand how an advanced type of imaging for men at risk of prostate cancer can help make early detection and diagnosis more affordable for healthcare facilities, and more widely available for patients. It’s called 3T multiparametric MRI of the prostate.
What is 3T Multiparametric MRI?
MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. Unlike body imaging that uses radiation, this type of imaging relies on a magnetic field and radio waves that make it vibrate, or resonate. These vibrations are picked up by a special antenna, and special software converts them to images on a computer monitor. This makes a 3-dimensional picture of a person’s internal anatomy (structures) like bones, organs, and other soft tissues. Here’s what 3T multiparametric MRI (3T mpMRI) means:
- 3T stands for 3 Tesla. “Tesla” is the term for how powerful the magnetic field is. The higher the number, the greater the power to produce high resolution images. Most facilities have 1.5T magnets, but 3T magnets are the new standard so facilities are acquiring them because the imaging results are better.
- Multiparametric means more than one parameter, or imaging sequence. By adjusting radio waves, different aspects of the same area are highlighted. This enables the radiologist who interprets the scan to see the difference between normal tissue vs. disease such as a tumor. It also allows the radiologist to determine how aggressive a tumor is.
When it comes to prostate cancer treatment, 3T mpMRI is today’s new standard of care for detecting suspicious areas, deciding if a needle biopsy is necessary to take samples, and guiding where to place the needles for accurate cancer diagnosis. Sound expensive? The technology is not cheap, but in fact it saves healthcare dollars. Here’s how.
How 3T mpMRI is Good Healthcare Economy
To understand how 3T mpMRI saves money, let’s look at the numbers. In 2023, roughly 288,300 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer (PCa). Prior to those diagnoses, millions of men were screened for PCa by a PSA blood test. Based on this test, which is not specific for PCa, 1 million men who had a suspicious PSA result were sent for an ultrasound-guided needle biopsy. That’s a lot of money spent on a biopsy method that’s not always accurate! Of those men, many ended up being over-treated for PCa that did could have been monitored instead, and many men were under-treated because their biopsy missed a small spot of aggressive PCa that later that later came back. The end result is thousands of men aggressively treated when they didn’t need to be (and who now are dealing with side effects like urinary leakage or impotence), and thousands of patients whose disease is missed until it’s no longer curable and require hormones, radiation and chemotherapies. Such consequences of inaccurate diagnosis are a huge economic burden that could have been avoided if 3T mpMRI had been added to the steps from PSA blood test to treatment.
An original investigation published in November, 2023 by JAMA points to the mistaken belief that MRI remains costly, despite the fact 3T mpMRI has greatly improved the precise detection of PCa that needs to be treated, and sparing costly interventions for PCa that does not. By analyzing projected rates of diagnosis over a 10-year period, and the costs of 3TmpMRI vs. ultrasound in the detection/diagnosis process, the authors found that “the MRI and potential MRI-guided biopsy strategy was cost-effective compared with standard [TRUS] biopsy.”
Thus, it’s not simply opinion that 3T mpMRI has not only brought new benefits to patients, but also to the health of our economy. While the use of ultrasound is still believed to be cheaper and more accessible than prostate MRI and in-bore MRI guided targeted biopsy, it fails to examine the rising hidden costs of money and patient quality of life attached to money vampires like biopsy side effects, biopsy, overtreatment of nonaggressive PCa, cumulative costs of treatment side effects, etc.
The true costs of ultrasound, not 3T mpMRI, mount up over time. Bravo to the authors of the JAMA article for pointing doctors, hospital systems and academic centers in the right clinical as well as economic direction.
NOTE: This content is solely for purposes of information and does not substitute for diagnostic or medical advice. Talk to your doctor if you have health concerns or questions of a personal medical nature.
