SUMMARY
Aleksandar Denic, M.D., Ph.D., is focused on understanding how kidney histology and macrostructure are associated with chronic kidney conditions and allograft loss in kidney transplant recipients. He uses kidney biopsies, clinical computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging scans to pursue these studies.
He also is interested in applying new artificial intelligence methods to quantify histological and macrostructural metrics.
Focus areas
- Artificial intelligence. Dr. Denic trains and applies artificial intelligence models to interpret kidney biopsies from living kidney donors and people with radical nephrectomies. He also identifies metrics that may be associated with the development of chronic kidney conditions in the future.
- Progression of kidney transplants. Dr. Denic uses morphometric approaches and artificial intelligence models to observe the natural progression of histological changes in monitored transplant recipients' kidney biopsies. Primarily, he studies biopsies obtained five years after a transplant and assesses which features pose poor prognosis for the allograft.
- Remaining kidney after a nephrectomy. Dr. Denic uses artificial intelligence models to study what happens to a remaining kidney in patients with radical nephrectomy due to kidney cancer. He researches whether there are changes in the remaining kidney associated with future chronic kidney conditions.
Significance to patient care
By studying kidney microstructure in different patient groups and various ages, Dr. Denic researches which microstructural measures are connected to simple aging and which are related to disease processes. In a kidney transplant setting, the current standard of care shows excellent survival of transplanted organs for the first several years. However, it has been hard to improve graft survival beyond five years. Therefore, research and understanding of what happens using late kidney biopsies is critical to the design of new strategies and therapies.