About Us

The Brisbane Lab - UCLA Department of Urology

The Brisbane Lab is located at the Department Urology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The lab's research focuses on novel image-guided diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer.  His lab utilizes Micro-Ultrasound, MRI, and PSMA PET in combination with machine learning to improve the diagnostic accuracy for identifying prostate cancer. The Brisbane Lab is dedicated to studying prostate cancer imaging and developing innovative solutions to improve patient outcomes. His work in Micro-ultrasound imaging is funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Phase One Foundation.

After skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most widely diagnosed cancer in men, with nearly 1 in 8 males diagnosed during their lifetime (Siegel et al., 2023).  Tissue acquisition remains the standard for a prostate cancer diagnosis; over 1 million prostate biopsies are performed annually in the United States (Loeb et al., 2011).  

The introduction of MRI enables improved cancer visualization compared to a systematic biopsy performed in a blind fashion (Elkhoury et al., 2019).  However, many tumors (35-45%) remain invisible to MRI imaging (Ahmed et al., 2017; Johnson et al., 2019).  Therefore, guideline organizations recommend MRI-targeted and systematic biopsies to avoid missing MRI-invisible tumors (Bjurlin et al., 2020; Mottet et al., 2021).  Our group has demonstrated that this strategy results in oversampling benign prostate tissue.  Only 12% of biopsy cores return with ≥ Grade Group 2 prostate cancer, and 90% are within 1 cm of the MRI target (Brisbane et al., 2022).  Additionally, work out of the NCI identified that MRI-missed cancer is likely the result of fusion and interpretation errors (Williams et al., 2022). 

Our lab has three goals: 

1. Refine imaging to remove the need for systematic biopsy and eventually biopsy altogether.
2. Understand the biology of imaging invisible prostate cancers.
3. Utilize imaging to define tumor boundaries for treatment.