Abstract:

A key contributor to the progression of nearly all forms of chronic kidney diseases is fibrosis,a largely irreversible process that drives further kidney injury.Accompany with fibrosis in kidney are microcirculation disorder,hypoxia,nephron losing,etc.However,despite its importance,clinicians currently have no means of noninvasively assessing above lesions,except historically relied on percutaneous renal biopsy.Renal biopsy is limited not only by its invasiveness,but also,because of the small amounts of tissue analyzed which leads to sampling bias.Recent advances in imaging technology have raised the exciting possibility of magnetic resonance imaging by capitalizing on the evaluating physical features of fibrotic and nonfibrotic tissue.In this review,we describe two key fibrosisinduced pathologic changes (capillary loss and kidney stiffening) that can be imaged by MRI techniques,and the potential for thesenew multiparameter MRIbased technologies to noninvasively examination.