Measurement of renal cortical fibrosis by CT scan.

Rationale and objectives: The accurate, non-invasive, and rapid measurement of renal cortical fibrosis is needed for well-defined benchmarks of permanent injury and for use of anti-fibrotic agents. It is also needed for non-invasive and rapid assessment of the chronicity of human renal diseases. Materials and methods: We have used a non-human primate model of radiation nephropathy to develop a novel method of size-corrected CT imaging to quantify renal cortical fibrosis. Results: Our method has an area under the receiver operating curve of 0.96, which is superior to any other non-invasive method of measuring renal fibrosis. Conclusion: Our method is suitable for immediate translation to human clinical renal diseases.