The multicenter, real-world trial showed that men with low-risk or favorable intermediate-risk disease who had higher Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) scores at baseline were more likely to be reclassified with more aggressive disease on a future biopsy.
This means that without MRI, some cases of prostate cancer are being labeled as lower-risk than they actually are.
Writing in The Journal of Urology, the investigators noted that MRI is increasingly being used to choose patients who are appropriate for active surveillance instead of treatment, but related clinical data are scarce.
Although PI-RADS is the preferred metric for characterizing prostate tumors via MRI, "most previous studies on the prognostic implications of baseline PI-RADS score included smaller populations from academic centers, limited inclusion of clinical and pathologic data into models, and/or [are] ambiguous on the implications of PI-RADS score.