Faculty Bibliography

OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact of the American Urological Association (AUA) guidelines advocating partial nephrectomy for T1 tumors guidelines on the likelihood of undergoing partial nephrectomy. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyzed the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), a dataset encompassing 20% of all United States inpatient hospitalizations, from 2007 through 2010. Our dependent variable was receipt of radical vs partial nephrectomy (55.50, 55.51, 55.52, and 55.54 vs 55.4) for a renal mass (International Classification of Disease, 9th Revision [ICD-9] code 189.0). The independent variable of interest was time of surgery (before or after the establishment of AUA guidelines); covariates included a diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD), overall comorbidity, age, race, gender, geographic region, income, and hospital characteristics. Bivariate and multivariable adjusted logistic regression was used to determine the association between receipt of partial nephrectomy and time of guideline establishment. RESULTS: We identified 26,165 patients with renal tumors who underwent surgery. Before the guidelines, 4031 patients (27%) underwent partial nephrectomy compared to 3559 (32%) after. On multivariable analysis, undergoing surgery after the establishment of guidelines (odds ratio [OR] 1.20, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.08-1.32, P <.01) was an independent predictor of partial nephrectomy. Other factors associated with partial nephrectomy were urban location, surgery at a teaching hospital, large hospital bed size, Northeast location, and Black race. Female gender and CKD were not associated with partial nephrectomy. CONCLUSION: Although adoption of partial nephrectomy increased after establishment of new guidelines on renal masses, partial nephrectomy remains an underutilized procedure. Future research must focus on barriers to adoption of partial nephrectomy and how to overcome them.

Compared with earlier prostate MRI techniques that suffered from relatively poor sensitivity and specificity for detecting prostate cancer because of their reliance predominantly on morphology, multiparametric prostate MRI (mpMRI) in 2013 provides a wealth of functional information that has made possible vastly improved detection and characterization of prostate cancer. Our aims in this article are to describe the various imaging sequences that comprise the mpMRI exam, as well as to review current literature on the strengths/weaknesses of these sequences; to delineate strategies for standardizing interpretation and reporting of MRI results; and finally, to expound on the role that prostate MRI currently does and potentially can play in clinical practice.