[The kidney xenograft. An echographic assessment of the tissue parameters of the normal pig kidney].

The prospect of xenogeneic transplantation emphasizes the usefulness of codifying the US patterns of normal pig kidney. Nineteen pigs underwent 35 US studies. Pig kidney is similar to the human one in size and US patterns. However, the average human and pig medullary pyramid indexes (MPI) differ, since the latter is half the former (2.10 vs 4.17). This is a valuable finding, since MPI is a tissular index used in the US evaluation of acute renal allograft rejection. Our results demonstrate that US is a reliable method for the morphological assessment of pig kidney and, therefore in our opinion, it should be used as a major diagnostic tool in the study of xenogeneic renal transplantation.