HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) Prostate Cancer Treatment Procedure & Process

I'm Ali Kasraeian. I'm a urologist here in Jacksonville, Florida, and I feel very fortunate to work with my dad here at Kasraeian Urology.

So high intensity focused ultrasound is a very innovative, minimally invasive outpatient way of managing prostate cancer. An exciting option that HIFU allows us to discuss is focal therapy, where you treat just the portion of the prostate that has prostate cancer, leaving the unaffected tissue alone so you minimize the impact of the treatment. So the more prostate you preserve, the more function you preserve.

Prostate cancer treated with HIFU needs your prostate to be really smaller than about 40 grams. Typically, it's intermediate risk prostate cancers that we're dealing with, and if there's an MR guided lesion that we've identified, so a region of interest on an MRI scan called a multi-parametric MRI or a bi-parametric MRI scan, we are able to treat that specific area or half the prostate or a portion of the prostate when indicated.

High density focused ultrasound is an outpatient procedure. Depending on the size of the prostate or whether we're doing a whole gland or a focal therapy, the time of the procedure is different, but it's an outpatient procedure. You go home the same day. Most people have a catheter in for a short period of time, and after the procedure is completed we generally check the first PSA in about three months to see how people are doing.

So the success of a prostate cancer treated with high intensity focused ultrasound, especially as a focal therapy, the goal is to treat the cancer in the region that it exists, and we use advanced technology and advanced diagnostics [inaudible 00:01:41] that the MRIs can't identify that, and success looks like having an MRI lesion that is no longer present or enhancing, and having a PSA that's downtrended and stable.