Tag : Kidneys

Oklahoma: Every year, over 8,000 individuals die while waiting for a kidney transplant, many of whom have been on donor waitlists for four or more years, hoping for a miracle. Researchers revealed that these deaths occur as a result of a worldwide scarcity of kidneys for transplantation, currently, there are no effective methods for determining the viability of enough donor kidneys donors to fulfill demand. A team of researchers from the University of Oklahoma and the OU Health Sciences Center, with assistance from LifeShare of Oklahoma, as well as researchers and clinicians from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Worchester Polytechnic Institute and Georgetown Medical Center will collaborate to investigate the use of optical coherence tomography to evaluate donor kidneys and develop new scanning methods and machine learning algorithms to reduce the evaluation time of donor kidneys while substantially increasing the information about the viability of these organs for transplant surgeons and clinicians. "Our goal is to develop a better, more objective method for evaluating kidney quality than is offered by current methods," Tang said. "We want to get more kidneys in the hands of transplant surgeons and make better use of the donor kidney pool." The current process for screening donor kidneys uses two methods - pathological scores based on anatomical features from a biopsy and the Kidney Donor Profile Index (KDPI) derived from the donor's medical history. However, clinical research indicates that those current methods have limited discriminative power. "By scanning the whole kidney surface, our device intends to eliminate the uncertainty created by the biopsy/KDPI paradigm," Tang said. In addition to Tang, the OU research team ...