Oncologists at the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center were the first in San Diego to use a new tool that allows them to improve prostate cancer diagnosis.

"We’re using a new technology that takes MRI and it merges it with the kind of pictures that we normally do when we do a prostate biopsy, which is an ultrasound. But ultrasound is imperfect and it doesn’t allow us in a very sophisticated way to see growths in the prostate that are suspicious for cancer – we took the most sophisticated technology available – an MRI – and merging that with the ultrasound machine when we do the biopsies so that I’m able to do a more sophisticated biopsy that uses the MRI images."

Urologic oncologist J. Kellogg Parsons adds that they were able to view growths in a patient that were previously undetectable.

"We were able to detect this cancer at a time where it is completely curable and we were only able to do that because of the MRI."