Clinical role of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of prostatic cancer

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become very important tool for diagnosis in many fields including neurology and orthopedics. In this article, the usefulness and current status of MRI in the clinical diagnosis of prostate cancer are discussed. The advantage of MRI over the other methods like ultrasound imaging and CT scan is that zonal anatomy of the prostate gland is clearly identified into peripheral, central and transition zone. Cancer in the peripheral zone is demonstrated as a low intensity lesion in T2-weighted images but cancer in other zones are difficult to be identified. Extracapsular invasion, seminal vesicle invasion and neuro-vascular invasion can be identified which is useful for the assessment of tumor extension. MRI is also useful for the detection of bone metastasis.