Cellular-Level Structure Imaging with Micro-optical Coherence Tomography $\mathbf{(\mu OCT)}$ for Kidney Disease Diagnosis

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the public health threats around the world, which may cause serious health problems like cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, or even more serious as premature death. Although CKD usually could be managed by general internists, such a way of treatment can be applied only when significant symptoms appear, which is very slow. It has also been reported that CKD could be characterized by means of glomeruli, and classified by the stages of disease severity for early treatment. However, due to lack of reliable method to detect the cellular-level microstructures for disease severity characterization, the diagnosis is troublesome, and thus, the treatments might be delayed while the best treatment time could be missed. For early detection of CKD, it is imperative to develop reliable tools to detect and characterize the disease at an early stage with minimal or noninvasiveness. For this research, the micro-optical coherence tomography $\mathbf{(\mu OCT)}$ was assessment it feasibility as a cellular-level structure imaging tool in kidney disease diagnosis at an early stage. Specifically, by measuring the number of glomeruli within a volumetric kidney tissue, a new diagnostic criteria is also established. Imaging results of the kidney specimens as compared their corresponding histology show that the cellular-level glomeruli structures could be identified clearly, and as a basic functional unit of kidney, it could be utilized as a reliable parameter to access the severity of the CKD.