Michael A. Brooks, MD

Michael A. Brooks, MD, Assistant Professor of Urology and Oncology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, discusses active surveillance and follow-up protocol best practices. In 2020 BCM started integrating MRI Fusion Biopsy into active surveillance protocol using best evidence. Dr. Brooks starts off by discussing the evidence for this new protocol from two different North American cohorts. He looks at MRI fusion biopsy in biopsy naive men, and discusses using MRI fusion biopsy for confirmation. He considers whether we can get rid of diagnostic and confirmation systematic biopsies as they can be replaced by the more accurate MRI fusion biopsy. He continues to discuss how often the biopsy needs to be repeated and special considerations that may need to be made when using this technology. He emphasizes that this is still very new and there are some special scenarios that are under studied. Some of the special scenarios include patients with high volume GG1, patients with GG2, and African American patients. Dr. Brooks also goes over the specific protocols that Baylor College of Medicine follows before discussing some pitfalls of the MRI fusion biopsy using a few case reviews as examples.