Dr. Hope on the Detection Sensitivity of PSMA-PET Scanning

Thomas Hope, MD, assistant professor of abdominal imaging and nuclear medicine at University of California, San Francisco, (UCSF) discusses the detection sensitivity of PSMA-PET scanning.

Prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-PET is an imaging study agent that localizes the tumor in about 1 hour. PSMA-PET has a high detection sensitivity and can detect subcentimeter sites in patients that would never have been found otherwise.

Retrospective data, especially from Europe and Australia, indicates how many biochemically recurrent patients have a PSMA avid node. Most of the data show that with a PSMA of <1, you can see a recurrence site in about 60% to 70% of patients, which is better than conventional imaging, such as CT or MRI. Researchers at UCSF recently completed a prospective, FDA-registration phase II/III trial that could be potentially completed by end of 2017.