Classifying murine glomerulonephritis using optical coherence tomography and optical coherence elastography

• Published in: Journal of biophotonics 2016-08, Vol.9 (8), p.781-791
• Main Authors: Liu, Chih-Hao, Du, Yong, Singh, Manmohan, Wu, Chen, Han, Zhaolong, Li, Jiasong, Chang, Anthony, Mohan, Chandra, Larin, Kirill V.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animals; Classification; Coherence; elastic-wave velocity; Elasticity Imaging Techniques; elasticity optical coherence elastography; glomerulonephritis; Glomerulonephritis - classification; Glomerulonephritis - diagnostic imaging; Imaging; Kidney - diagnostic imaging; Kidneys; Medical imaging; Mice; Micrometers; optical attenuation; Optical Coherence Tomography; Phantoms, Imaging; Spatial resolution; speckle variance; Tomography; Tomography, Optical Coherence; Tomography, X-Ray Computed; Ultrasonic imaging; Ultrasound; Urine; Young's modulus
• ISSN: 1864-063X; 1864-0648
• DOI: 10.1002/jbio.201500269

Acute glomerulonephritis caused by antiglomerular basement membrane marked by high mortality. The primary reason for this is delayed diagnosis via blood examination, urine analysis, tissue biopsy, or ultrasound and X‐ray computed tomography imaging. Blood, urine, and tissue‐based diagnoses can be time consuming, while ultrasound and CT imaging have relatively low spatial resolution, with reduced sensitivity. Optical coherence tomography is a noninvasive and high‐resolution imaging technique that provides superior spatial resolution (micrometer scale) as compared to ultrasound and CT. Changes in tissue properties can be detected based on the optical metrics analyzed from the OCT signals, such as optical attenuation and speckle variance. Furthermore, OCT does not rely on ionizing radiation as with CT imaging. In addition to structural changes, the elasticity of the kidney can significantly change due to nephritis. In this work, OCT has been utilized to quantify the difference in tissue properties between healthy and nephritic murine kidneys. Although OCT imaging could identify the diseased tissue, its classification accuracy is clinically inadequate. By combining optical metrics with elasticity, the classification accuracy improves from 76% to 95%. These results show that OCT combined with OCE can be a powerful tool for identifying and classifying nephritis. Therefore, the OCT/OCE method could potentially be used as a minimally invasive tool for longitudinal studies during the progression and therapy of glomerulonephritis as well as complement and, perhaps, substitute highly invasive tissue biopsies. Elastic‐wave propagation in mouse healthy and nephritic kidneys. Commonly used imaging platforms such as CT, MRI and US are not suitable for detecting glomerulonephritis. Here, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and optical coherence elastography (OCE) are combined in order to cocapture structural and elastic information with micrometer spatial resolution. The results show that OCT/OCE was able to distinguish nephritic kidneys from healthy controls with 95% prediction accuracy, which suggests a promising application of the presented technique in clinical glomerulonephritis detection using minimally invasive procedures.