Towards minimally-invasive, quantitative assessment of chronic kidney disease using optical spectroscopy

The universal pathologic features implicated in the progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD) are interstitial fibrosis and tubular atrophy (IFTA). Current methods of estimating IFTA are slow, labor-intensive and fraught with variability and sampling error, and are not quantitative. As such, there is pressing clinical need for a less-invasive and faster method that can quantitatively assess the degree of IFTA. We propose a minimally-invasive optical method to assess the macro-architecture of kidney tissue, as an objective, quantitative assessment of IFTA, as an indicator of the degree of kidney disease. The method of elastic-scattering spectroscopy (ESS) measures backscattered light over the spectral range 320–900 nm and is highly sensitive to micromorphological changes in tissues. Using two discrete mouse models of CKD, we observed spectral trends of increased scattering intensity in the near-UV to short-visible region (350–450 nm), relative to longer wavelengths, for fibrotic kidneys compared to normal kidney, with a quasi-linear correlation between the ESS changes and the histopathology-determined degree of IFTA. These results suggest the potential of ESS as an objective, quantitative and faster assessment of IFTA for the management of CKD patients and in the allocation of organs for kidney transplantation.