Diagnostic accuracy of qualitative and quantitative magnetic resonance imaging-guided contrast-enhanced ultrasound (MRI-guided CEUS) for the detection of prostate cancer: a prospective and multicenter study

To evaluate the diagnostic value of MRI-guided contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) for prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis, and characteristics of PCa in qualitative and quantitative CEUS.

This prospective and multicenter study included 250 patients (133 in the training cohort, 57 in the validation cohort and 60 in the test cohort) who underwent MRI, MRI-guided CEUS and prostate biopsy between March 2021 and February 2023. MRI interpretation, qualitative and quantitative CEUS analysis were conducted. Multitree extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) machine learning-based models were applied to select the eight most important quantitative parameters. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were constructed to select independent predictors of PCa. Diagnostic value was determined for MRI, qualitative and quantitative CEUS using the area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC).

The performance of quantitative CEUS was superior to that of the qualitative CEUS and MRI in predicting PCa. The AUC was 0.779 (95%CI 0.70–0.849), 0.756 (95%CI 0.638–0.874) and 0.759 (95%CI 0.638–0.879) of qualitative CEUS, and 0.885 (95%CI 0.831–0.940), 0.802 (95%CI 0.684–0.919) and 0.824 (95%CI 0.713–0.936) of quantitative CEUS in training, validation and test cohort, respectively. Compared with quantitative CEUS, MRI achieved less well performance for AUC 0.811 (95%CI 0.741–0.882, p = 0.099), 0.748 (95%CI 0.628–0.868, p = 0.539) and 0.737 (95%CI 0.602–0.873, p = 0.029), respectively. Moreover, the highest specificity of 80.6% was obtained by quantitative CEUS.

We developed a reliable method of MRI-guided CEUS that demonstrated enhanced performance compared to MRI. The qualitative and quantitative CEUS characteristics will contribute to improved diagnosis of PCa.