Washington, May 31 (IANS): In a major success, an Indian-American scientist and his colleague have identified a new, less-invasive method to provide diagnostic information on kidney disease and its severity.

They used an optical probe and Raman spectroscopy to differentiate between healthy and diseased kidneys.

"There are some molecules that must be responsible for these different Raman signals, but we don't need to know what those molecules may be," said Chandra Mohan, professor at University of Houston in the US.

"As long as there's a difference in the signal, that's good enough -- you can easily differentiate between a diseased kidney's Raman signal and a healthy kidney's Raman signal," Mohan said.

Apart from the potential side effects, the number of renal biopsies a patient can undergo is limited because of damage to the kidney tissue.

For the study, Mohan and his colleague Wei-Chuan Shih, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, relied upon the fact that a healthy kidney and a diseased kidney produce different Raman signals.

"Raman spectroscopy provides molecular fingerprints that enable non-invasive or minimal invasive and label-free detection for the quantification of subtle molecular changes," Mohan and Shih said.

"By adapting multivariate analysis to Raman spectroscopy, we have successfully differentiated between the diseased and the non-diseased with up to 100 percent accuracy, and among the severely diseased, the mildly diseased and the healthy with up to 98 percent accuracy," concluded Mohan and Shih.

The study was outlined in the Journal of Biophotonics.