Texture Analysis of Multiparametric Kidney MRI-A Non-Invasive Approach to Chronic Kidney Disease State

Introduction: The most common indication of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a sudden deterioration of renal function. At that point, the only reliable test determining disease progression is the histopathological evaluation of material obtained during kidney biopsy. Although biopsy is currently the gold standard of diagnosis, the procedure is associated with a number of complications that further burden kidney function. The aim of this work is to evaluate the potential of multiparametric magnetic resonance image (MRI) in the assessment of the renal parenchyma state. Material and Methods: The study is based on kidney MRI examinations of healthy volunteers (group 1, n = 11) and patients suffering from CKD in the active phase (group 2, n = 29) or the non-active phase (group 3, n = 14), as confirmed by kidney biopsy. The T1-weighted images, T2-weighted images and DWI images were extracted and used to create algorithms, based on Support Vector Machine and Sequential Floating Forward Search, aimed to differentiate defined groups. Results: The final algorithms obtained the following metrics: for T1-weighted images, analysis-precision 91.5%, sensitivity 89.6%, specificity 94.8%; for T2-weighted images, analysis-precision 80.2%, sensitivity 79.0%, specificity 89.5%; for DWI images, analysis-precision 82.3%, sensitivity 82.1%, specificity 91.0%; and for multiparametric MRIs, analysis-precision 90.9%, sensitivity 90.4%, specificity 95.2%. Conclusions: Texture analysis of multiparametric MRI seems to have diagnostic potential in CKD and its development may reduce the frequency of invasive procedures such as kidney biopsy.