Establishing a New Ultrasound Technique to Improve Assessment of Chronic Kidney Disease.

Correlation between ASL-MRI measures of cortical perfusion (ml/ 100g/min) and CEUS measures of renal microvascular blood flow.

Blood flow to the kidneys is important in the development of kidney diseases. Currently we do
 not have ways of measuring and monitoring kidney blood flow for patients in real-time. This
 is a major barrier to investigation and management of acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic
 kidney disease (CKD).
 
 Kidney blood flow can be reliably measured using a specialised type of MRI scan, but this is
 expensive and difficult to do in people who are unwell. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS)
 is a new technique, which uses a contrast containing microbubbles to measure blood flow. The
 benefits of this method are that it is relatively inexpensive, the contrast agents are not
 kidney-damaging and it can be done at the bedside.
 
 We want to compare contrast enhanced ultrasound against the current best-measure of kidney
 blood flow, to see if it is giving accurate information about kidney blood flow. We will do
 this by doing both MRI and contrast enhanced ultrasound scans in people with chronic kidney
 disease and comparing the results.