Alternate Non-invasive Method To Diagnose Kidney Diseases Using Raman Spectroscopy

US-based scientists have developed a new less-invasive diagnostic tool to identify kidney diseases and assess its severity level using Raman Spectroscopy. Physicians traditionally use renal biopsy to directly observe kidney function. // "Raman spectroscopy provides molecular fingerprints that enable non-invasive or minimal invasive and label-free detection for the quantification of subtle molecular changes," researchers said. It has the potential to largely reduce the complexity in diagnosing and monitoring anti-GBM (glomerular basement membrane) diseases.

Professor Chandra Mohan of the University of Houston and his colleague Wei-Chuan Shih have found that there is a difference in signals obtained from a healthy and a diseased kidney, which helps to diagnose the status of a kidney in a patient.

“There are some molecules that must be responsible for these different Raman signals, but we don’t need to know what those molecules may be. As long as there’s a difference in the signal, that’s good enough — you can easily differentiate between a diseased kidney’s Raman signal and a healthy kidney’s Raman signal,” said Mohan.

Mohan added that, being minimal invasive and often non-invasive, the new diagnostic method also enables a label-free detection for the quantification of subtle molecular changes.

“By adapting multivariate analysis to Raman spectroscopy, we have successfully differentiated between the diseased and the non-diseased with up to 100% accuracy, and among the severely diseased, the mildly diseased and the healthy with up to 98% accuracy,” said researchers Mohan and Shih.

Source-Medindia