Diagnostic information through ‘Raman signals’.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian American scientist Chandra Mohan and his colleagues have identified a new, less-invasive method to provide diagnostic information on kidney disease and its severity, reported Phys.org.
Mohan, along with Wei-Chuan Shih, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen, endowed professor of biomedical engineering, published their research in the Journal of Biophotonics.
Additional authors on the paper are Jingting Li, Yong Du, Ji Qi and Ravikumar Sneha, all of the University of Houston, and Anthony Chang of the University of Chicago.
In their study, Mohan and Shih looked for different “Raman signals” amongst diseased kidneys using an optical probe and Raman spectroscopy.
“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,’ Mohan told Phys.org. “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 and Shih also used demonstrated how optical probe can be used to differentiate between a healthy and a diseased kidney without puncturing the organ. The research team developed a metric to broadly quantify the level of disease using the Raman scattering signals,” reported Phys.org.
“We are proposing the nephrologist will puncture the patient’s skin, go to the surface of the kidney, and not puncture the kidney, but probe the surface of the tissue and acquire Raman signals,” Mohan said. “The patient will feel a little pinch and poke through the skin, but the kidney is not hurt at all,” he continued.
Mohan and Shih reported their analyses provided 100 percent accuracy between the diseases and non-diseases and 98 percent accuracy among the severely diseases, the mildly diseases, and the healthy.