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NephroCAGE: German-Canadian Consortium on AI for Improved Kidney Transplantation Outcome

Executive Summary

The German-Canadian consortium NephroCAGE is cooperating to demonstrate the added value of artificial intelligence (AI) using the concrete clinical example of kidney transplantation. Inadequate kidney function requires regular dialysis: there are currently around 100,000 dialysis patients in Germany, and around half that number in Canada. Dialysis costs approximately 30-40k EUR per patient per year. In comparison, a kidney transplant costs around 15-20 thousand euros. In 2019, more than 2,100 kidney transplants were performed in Germany (German Organ Transplant Foundation) and more than 1,700 in Canada (Canadian Institute for Health in Canada). However, suitable donor organs are rare: in Germany, for example, there are more than 7,000 patients on a waiting list, and in Canada more than 3,000. Even after a transplant, there is a risk of complications that can lead to severe limitations in kidney function or, in the worst case, even total loss of the organ.

The consortium partners are creating a learning AI system to match organ donors and recipients even more precisely in advance (matching) and thus prevent risks in kidney transplants. To this end, clinical centers of excellence in both nations are contributing transplant data from the last ten years. They will be analyzed using AI learning techniques and combined together with a novel matching algorithm to create clinical prognostic models for kidney transplant patients. By using a federated learning approach, where the algorithms are executed at the location of the data, data protection is maintained and sensitive health data from both nations can serve as a common basis for clinical prognostic models for the first time. As a result, a clinical demonstrator will be created to serve the exploitation of the medical and technical innovations in the context of care, as well as a basis for exploitation and follow-on projects.

Project Partners

Canada

  • The University of British Columbia, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Genome BC, Vancouver, British Columbia 
  • Genome Canada, Ontario, Ottawa 
  • McGill University Health Centre, Montréal, Québec
  • Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal, Québec
  • Genome Quebec, Montréal, Québec

Germany

 

Publications

Research Publications

  • Schapranow, M.-P.: NephroCAGE: Wie Künstliche Intelligenz bei Nierenversagen unterstützen kann. Gesundhyte: Forschung neu vernetzen. 15, 100—102 (2023).
  • Schapranow, M.-P., Bayat, M., Rasheed, A., Naik, M., Graf, V., Schmidt, D., Budde, K., Cardinal, H., Sapir-Pichhadze, R., Fenninger, F., Sherwood, K., Keown, P., Günther, O., Pandl, K., Leiser, F., Thiebes, S., Sunyaev, A., Niemann, M., Schimanski, A., Klein, T.: NephroCAGE—German-Canadian Consortium on AI for Improved Kidney Transplantation Outcome: Protocol for an Algorithm Development and Validation Study. JMIR Res Protoc 2023. 12, (2023).
  • Borchert, F., Llorca, I., Schapranow, M.-P.: Cross-Lingual Candidate Retrieval and Re-ranking for Biomedical Entity Linking. In: Arampatzis, A., Kanoulas, E., Tsikrika, T., Vrochidis, S., Giachanou, A., Li, D., Aliannejadi, M., Vlachos, M., Faggioli, G., en Ferro, N. (reds.) Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. bll. 135–147. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham (2023).
  • Llorca, I., Borchert, F., Schapranow, M.-P.: A Meta-dataset of German Medical Corpora: Harmonization of Annotations and Cross-corpus NER Evaluation. Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop. bll. 171–181. Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada (2023).
  • Kämmer, N., and Borchert, F., and Winkler, S., and de Melo, G., and Schapranow, M.-P.: Resolving Elliptical Compounds in German Medical Text. The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks. bll. 292–305. Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada (2023).

Events

Sponsors

The project is generously sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (2021-2022) as project of strategic interest.