MRI Guided Fresh Tissue Procurement in Radical Prostatectomy Specimens: An Evolutionary Paradigm

Purpose: The aim of this work is to assess the feasibility of novel targeted methods for fresh tissue procurement that facilitate accurate identification of lesion location and tissue sample extraction in an excised prostate gland, while minimizing the tissue deformation or damage. Methods and Results: Proposed fresh tissue procurement methods are based on utilizing a custom 3D printed patient-specific prostate mold. In the semi-freehand method, the access cut is guided by a set of markers on the bottom of the mold that define the boundary of a lesion in two orthogonal directions. The procurement site is identified by palpation. In the guided cut with- locator card method the procurement sites are identified by a cutout in the locator cards inserted into the access cuts. The two approaches were utilized to procure >50 samples. In the biopsy needle method guiding channels were designed into the prostate mold to procure fresh tissue. This method was used 4 times. Finally, a mixed-reality biopsy needle method was developed for phantom testing. Conclusions: Preliminary results of fresh tissue procurement utilizing novel methods showed improve precision of obtaining cancerous fresh tissue for molecular and genomic cancer research compared to current methods which rely on surgical estimation of lesion location. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.