Kidney Disease and Ultrasound Imaging

Kidney transplant patients are exposed to long-term immunosuppressive therapy, and have an increased risk of infections and cancer, while a lack of treatment increases the risk of rejection. The development of imaging techniques to characterize the status of the graft remains a challenge in transplantation. Ideally, they should identify complications (acute rejection, chronic allograft nephropathy, nephrotoxicity ...) without the need for invasive procedures and thus lead to better customization of immunosuppressive therapy. The post-transplant follow-up is based on the monitoring of graft function. Impaired function suggests the possibility of a complication, but requires confirmation by an invasive procedure such as renal biopsy. In addition, the diagnosis remains complex at a relatively advanced stage of the process due to damage to the graft parenchyma. To anticipate the altered function and detect subclinical lesions, screening biopsies have been used to diagnose chronic rejection. By definition, screening for subclinical lesions can not be based on any biological parameter; the diagnosis of subclinical complications thus requires performing multiple systematic biopsies, which are scheduled at 3 months and 1 year. Doppler ultrasound is an imaging method of choice for the study of renal transplant, but it cannot diagnose the NCT due to the absence of specific findings. The lack of early diagnostic test for NCT is a major obstacle to the development and evaluation of new therapeutic options to prevent, slow or stabilize renal fibrosis. It is therefore necessary to develop a non-invasive imaging technique for the early diagnosis of NCT. Ultrasound elastography is a technique that allows tissue stiffness measurements and provides a parametric picture. The main objective of our study is to evaluate the performances of elastography and measurement of renal perfusion (area under the ROC curve) to diagnose the NCT and determine for each both measures a threshold to maximize the sensitivity. These performances will be evaluated at 3 months and 12 months. The results can also be compared to other imaging modalities such as functional MRI, and to clinical events (obstruction, infection…). Functional ultrasound imaging should identify diagnostic and prognostic criteria of NCT, and enable the development of less invasive therapeutic protocols to evaluate new therapeutic approaches