According to a new study, the researchers introduced a new, less-invasive method to provide diagnostic information on kidney disease and its severity.

The research was led by an Indian-American scientist and his colleague, 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” he added.

Raman spectroscopy provides molecular fingerprints that enable non-invasive or minimal invasive and label-free detection for the quantification of subtle molecular changes. It has the potential to largely reduce the complexity in diagnosing and monitoring anti-GBM (glomerular basement membrane) diseases.

"By adapting multivariate analysis to Raman spectroscopy, we have successfully differentiated between the diseased and the non-diseased with up to 100 per cent accuracy, and among the severely diseased, the mildly diseased and the healthy with up to 98 per cent accuracy," they said.

The findings of the study were published in the Journal of Biophotonics.

By Lizitha