PET/MRI and prostate cancer

Advances in medical imaging are needed to support the general goal of personalized patient-centric care. This is particularly true for prostate cancer, which frequently presents as the initial multifocal disease with variable significance and outcome, and, when aggressive, can recur after the initial definitive management. The combined simultaneous acquisition of multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) can provide combined structural, metabolic, and functional imaging information regarding prostate cancer status in a whole-body single session examination. As described in this review article, combining PET and MRI appears particularly useful for pelvic disease assessments, as PET and MRI provide complementary information, which can be best obtained with hybrid PET/MR scanners. While there is growing interest in the field of prostate cancer imaging regarding the value of PET/MRI, the current literature in this field is sparse and insufficient for a systematic analysis. This article, therefore, highlights available evidence and future perspectives of PET/MRI for the initial diagnosis, staging, and restaging of prostate cancer with choline-based radiotracers as well as ligands to target prostate-specific membrane antigen.