Prostate Molds for MRI Research

Our Prostate Integrated Diagnostics (IDx) team at UCLA has developed materials and procedures for creating patient-specific 3D prostate molds. The 3D prostate contour is segmented on pre-surgical in vivo T2-weighted MRI and used to design/print a custom mold for each individual patient. These prostate molds can be used to perform ex vivo MRI of the resected prostate specimen and facilitate alignment between pre-surgical in vivo MRI, ex vivo MRI, and whole-mount histopathlogy slides for research.  The instructions and template files for 3D printing are provided below for academic use. 

File download (includes instructions) [updated 2018.3.28]

References:

• Priester A, Natarajan S, Khoshnoodi P, Margolis DJ, Raman SS, Reiter RE, Huang J, Grundfest W, Marks LS. Magnetic resonance imaging underestimation of prostate cancer geometry: use of patient specific molds to correlate images with whole mount pathology. The Journal of Urology 2017;197:320–326.
• Priester A, Wu H, Khoshnoodi P, Schneider D, Zhang Z, Asvadi N, Sisk A, Raman S, Reiter R, Grundfest W, Marks LS, Natarajan S. Registration Accuracy of Patient-Specific 3D Printed Prostate Molds for Correlating Pathology with Magnetic Resonance Imaging. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 2018.
• Wu HH, Priester A, Khoshnoodi P, Zhang Z, Shakeri S, Afshari Mirak S, Asvadi NH, Ahuja P, Sung K, Natarajan S, Sisk A, Reiter R, Raman S, Enzmann D. A System Using Patient-Specific 3D-Printed Molds to Spatially Align In Vivo MRI with Ex Vivo MRI and Whole-Mount Histopathology for Prostate Cancer Research. Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging 2018.