(UroToday.com) At the podium, Dr. Chase Ng presented a retrospective study that examined the 5-year outcomes of patients who were screened and found to be negative through the rapid assessment for prostate imaging and diagnosis (RAPID) pathway. Traditional prostate cancer screening and diagnostics is a lengthy process that often requires extended visits and testing. As such, the RAPID pathway was introduced to make this process more streamlined, thereby alleviating the unnecessary burden that the conventional approach imposes on the healthcare system and patients. Although more efficient, questions in regard to the accuracy and safety of this approach may be of concern of which Dr. Ng’s work plays a significant role in addressing.
In this retrospective single center cohort study, 1285 patients who were evaluated by the RAPID pathway and subsequently discharged from May 2017 to January 2023 were enrolled. Cancer-free survival and treatment-free survival were evaluated for these individuals. Kaplan-Meier plots were utilized to estimate the survival outcomes after 5 years.
Dr. Ng and his team highlighted that clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa)-free survival was 92.3%, with a csPCa diagnosis occurring in 1 in 12 men. Treatment-free survival was 94.3% with required cancer treatment in 1 in 20 men.
The figure below depicts the cancer-free and treatment-free survival rates over time subsequent to initial RAPID evaluation.
Dr. Ng confidently concluded that the use of RAPID as an MRI-based diagnostic tool for prostate cancer is efficacious, as demonstrated by the high cancer-free and treatment-free survival rates. His take home message is that pre-biopsy MRI is safe and optimal to minimize testing redundancy and overdiagnosis.
Presented by: Chase Ng, MBChB MRCS, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
Written by: Victor Pham, B.S., University of California Irvine, @victorpham01 on X during the 2025 American Urological Association (AUA) annual meeting held in Las Vegas, NV, Saturday, April 26 - Tuesday, April 29, 2025
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