Renal tubular structure and metabolism revealed by dynamic optical coherence tomography and OCT angiography

Abstract

We present three-dimensional, label-free renal tubular metabolism imaging by functional optical coherence tomography (OCT) including dynamics imaging method so-called “logarithmic intensity variance (LIV)” and OCT angiography (OCTA). Normal mouse kidneys and obstructed kidney models were investigated ex vivo. In the normal kidney, several vertical tails of high-LIV and hyper-OCTA signals were observed in the corresponding cross-sectional images. These signals formed pipe-like structures in the en face slab average projection images. In the obstructed kidneys, such anatomical pipe-like structures disappeared and instead, a circular shell at the edge of the renal cortex region was observed in the LIV.