America
Indian-American scientist finds new way for kidney diagnosis
Washington, May 31
In a major success, an
Indian-American scientist and his colleague have identified a new,
less-invasive method to provide diagnostic information on kidney disease
and its severity.
They used an optical probe and Raman spectroscopy to differentiate between healthy and diseased kidneys.
"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," said
Chandra Mohan, professor at University of Houston in the US.
"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," Mohan said.
Apart from the
potential side effects, the number of renal biopsies a patient can
undergo is limited because of damage to the kidney tissue.
For
the study, Mohan and his colleague Wei-Chuan Shih, assistant professor
of electrical and computer engineering, relied upon the fact that a
healthy kidney and a diseased kidney produce different Raman signals.
"Raman
spectroscopy provides molecular fingerprints that enable non-invasive
or minimal invasive and label-free detection for the quantification of
subtle molecular changes," Mohan and Shih said.
"By adapting
multivariate analysis to Raman spectroscopy, we have successfully
differentiated between the diseased and the non-diseased with up to 100
percent accuracy, and among the severely diseased, the mildly diseased
and the healthy with up to 98 percent accuracy," concluded Mohan and
Shih.
The study was outlined in the Journal of Biophotonics.