Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers believe a new robotic technology they’re developing can help save lives by improving the process of matching kidney donors with people awaiting a transplant. Their approach seeks to advance medical evaluations that determine whether a donated kidney is viable to be transplanted.According to the National Kidney Foundation, 90,000 people in the United States are on a kidney waitlist; each day, 12 die before a transplant can happen.While a shortage of donors is one reason for the long waitlist, another major factor is the number of donated kidneys that get discarded. Assessing a kidney for transplant involves examining the organ after it’s been removed from the donor to ensure the kidney is free of disease or structural anomalies.Current methods for this assessment include either a biopsy, which involves a review of cells taken from a small sample of the kidney, or optical coherence tomography (OCT), a light-based handheld imaging technology that can provide a high-resolution snapshot of a limited section of the organ.The assessment process risks wasting the organ because these exams take time and provide information about only a small portion of the kidney; both factors may hamper clinicians’ ability to accurately assess the organ and approve it for transplant while it is still viable.Haichong (Kai) Zhang, associate professor of robotics engineering and biomedical engineering, and Xihan Ma, a robotics engineering PhD student, are using innovations in medical robotics to address this problem.“With our robotic system, we can capture a scan of the whole kidney,” said Zhang. “With current approaches, the area of the kidney that can be assessed is inherently limited by either the size of the biopsy needle or the size of the OCT imaging probe, and thus the assessment of the organ is biased by which small part of the kidney the operator chooses to focus on.”Zhang and Ma have developed a robotic OCT system, which is a fully automated method of imaging an entire donated kidney to help a clinician make an assessment. The system was developed at WPI’s Medical FUSION (Frontier Ultrasound Imaging and Robotic Instrumentation) Lab.“Our motivation is to think about how we can streamline the process used to evaluate the viability of donated kidneys to be more reliable and accurate, and to not waste kidneys that potentially can be used to save lives of patients,” said Zhang. “We are integrating the strengths of medical robots to make imaging of donor kidneys more accessible and less user-dependent and to acquire images over a wider area of the organ, which can provide more concise and direct feedback to clinicians so they can make better clinical decisions.”The method Zhang’s team developed consists of a robotic arm and a software system programmed to position an optical coherence tomography camera above a donated kidney in a sample tray at the height that will ensure maximum image quality. Zhang said the innovation improves upon handheld OCT technology, which requires a person to manually hold the imaging device at the proper height and take photos one at a time, a process that can be difficult and time-consuming. Through the robotic system, the imaging device can automatically and precisely adjust its position to sweep above the entire kidney, without touching it, and stitch together a full image of the organ, without missing any portions of it.The robotic system analyzes information from a separate 3D camera mounted to the arm to plot out a path, like how a GPS unit devises a route, to ensure a full scan. “This real-time information from the images will guide the robot to apply a more optimized scanning trajectory and optimize the image quality,” said Ma, who added that the images from the scan appear immediately on a monitor for a clinician’s assessment of the transplant viability. “Ultimately, this system will provide the clinical staff with valuable information about the kidney’s health status.”Zhang and Ma are part of a cross-institution research team working on this project. The team includes experts in optics and biomedical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Oklahoma, as well as clinical experts in biology and biochemistry at Georgetown University. The research is funded by a $2,527,424 award, shared among the organizations, from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.In September 2024, the research team published findings of its testing on the robotic optical coherence tomography system in the journal Communications Engineering. The testing, conducted at PracticePoint, WPI’s state-of-the-art medical technology and biotechnology research and development testing facility, used 3D-printed objects to mimic the structure of kidneys as well as a donated human kidney that had been declined for transplantation. The tests demonstra...