Non-invasive assessment of kidney function and microstructure is important for diagnosis and treatment monitoring of patients with kidney diseases. Besides the ability to make high-resolution diagnostic images, MR also has the potential for evaluating a number of functional parameters. These are not yet established clinical methods, and further development and validations are needed before the methods will be clinically useful. The main limitations of most of these method are low sensitivity, but also motion complicates their use. In this lecture we will discuss the most promising of these MR biomarkers for assessing kidney function and microstructure, and we will briefly touch up on some arising methodologies The methods will include measurement of blood perfusion using ASL and arterial blood supply using phase contrast; estimation of oxygenation with BOLD imaging; microstructural characterization using diffusion imaging and relaxation mapping (T1, T2 and T1rho) and finally we will briefly discuss some non-proton methods with and without hyperpolarization. We will also discuss the accuracy and repeatability of the various methods.

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References

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