Comparing Accuracy Findings from the proPSMA Study for PSMA PET/CT and Conventional Imaging

Professor Declan Murphy of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre broke down the recent accuracy findings in an interview with CancerNetwork on his research for the proPSMA study to treat patients with prostate cancer.

Transcription:

So, the primary end point of proPSMA was accuracy. We wanted to compare this novel imaging with PSMA PET/CT with conventional imaging. One of the first comments I’ll make I suppose is that we know conventional imaging does quite poorly in staging these newly diagnosed high-risk prostate cancers. All too often conventional imaging with CT and bone scan or even MRI scan will fail to detect small volume disease outside the prostate. Patients will go on and have local treatment to the prostate with surgery or radiation but have a high recurrence rate. You know, 40-50% of patients will have biochemical recurrence, and really part of that failure is that the patients were not correctly staged in the first instance because conventional imaging does poorly.

So, I think that’s what the control arm of our study showed, that when we compared conventional imaging with the reference standard—so we had to define a reference standard for what the ground truth might be—we see conventional imaging is only right about 65% of the time. Whereas, when we use PSMA PET/CT, we know it’s right more than 90% of the time. So, this gives us a big delta at 27% difference in accuracy between PSMA PET/CT and conventional imaging.