Repeat Prostate Biopsy Strategies after Initial Negative Biopsy: Meta-Regression Comparing Cancer Detection of Transperineal, Transrectal Saturation and MRI Guided Biopsy

There is no consensus on how to investigate men with negative transrectal ultrasound guided prostate biopsy (TRUS-B) but ongoing suspicion of cancer. Three strategies used are transperineal (TP-B), transrectal saturation (TS-B) and MRI-guided biopsy (MRI-B). We compared cancer yields of these strategies.Papers were identified by search of Pubmed, Embase and Ovid Medline. Included studies investigated biopsy diagnostic yield in men with at least one negative TRUS-B and ongoing suspicion of prostate cancer. Data including age, PSA, number of previous biopsy episodes, number of cores at re-biopsy, cancer yield, and Gleason score of detected cancers were extracted. Meta-regression analyses were used to analyse the data.Forty-six studies were included; 12 of TS-B, 14 of TP-B, and 20 of MRI-B, representing 4,657 patients. Mean patient age, PSA and number of previous biopsy episodes were similar between the strategies. The mean number of biopsy cores obtained by TP-B and TS-B were greater than MRI-B. Cancer detection rates were 30·0%, 36·8%, and 37·6% for TS-B, TP-B, and MRI-B respectively. Meta-regression analysis showed that MRI-B had significantly higher cancer detection than TS-B. There were no significant differences however between MRI-B and TP-B, or TP-B and TS-B. In a sensitivity analysis incorporating number of previous biopsy episodes (36 studies) the difference between MRI-B and TP-B was not maintained resulting in no significant difference in cancer detection between the groups. There were no significant differences in median Gleason scores detected comparing the three strategies.In the re-biopsy setting, it is unclear which strategy offers the highest cancer detection rate. MRI-B may potentially detect more prostate cancers than other modalities and can achieve this with fewer biopsy cores. However, well–designed prospective studies with standardised outcome measures are needed to accurately compare modalities and define an optimum re-biopsy approach