Imaging and spatial omics of kidney injury: significance, challenges, advances and perspectives.

Abstract

The kidneys are susceptible to a range of insults that can cause damage to them. Early diagnosis, timely prevention, and proper treatment are crucial for improving the outcome of kidney injury. However, the complexity of renal structure and function makes it difficult to reach the demand of early detection and comprehensive evaluation ofkidney injury. No successful drug therapy caused by theelaborate pathogenesis mechanism network of kidney injury calls for a systematical interpretation in mechanism researches. Recent advances in renal imaging and omics studies have provided novel views and deeper insights intokidney injury, but also raise challenges in reaching acomprehensive cellular and molecular atlas of kidney injury. Progresses in imaging and omics of kidney injury arebeing made in various directions, with the initiative ofconstruction a high-resolution structural atlas of kidney,dynamic and non-invasive evaluation of renal function, andsystematic establishment of spatially resolved molecular atlas by transcriptomics and metabolomics. With thelimitations of a single modality, novel multimodal integration technologies of imaging and omicsare beingattempted to achieve a systematic description ofnephropathy mechanisms. Further extensive efforts inrenal multimodal imaging and omics studies are extremely required to deepen our understanding on kidney injury inthe context of diagnostic, mechanistic andtherapeutic perspectives.