Timo Soeterik

PREFACE Prostate cancer is a disease with a tremendous individual, societal and economic impact. The overall burden of this entity and its associated treatments have been shown to be extremely high in both human and financial terms. Optimising prostate cancer staging can lead to higher treatment benefits for the patient with regard to oncological control, while retaining quality of life by minimizing intervention-related morbidity. Improved understanding of the disease stage also helps to successfully avoid or postpone interventions and associated side-effects in those with indolent tumours, while ensuring patients in whom active treatment is indicated are successfully identified. In this thesis, we describe the main findings of our search towards optimised prostate cancer outcomes by means of improving initial tumour staging, combined with further exploring non-invasive prostate cancer management by expanding our knowledge on active surveillance.