Marcel Ganesh Naik

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Medical School - Charité

The use of deep neural models for diagnosis prediction from clinical text has shown promising results. However, in clinical practice such models must not only be accurate, but provide doctors with interpretable and helpful results. We introduce ProtoPatient, a novel method based on prototypical networks and label-wise attention with both of these a...

Background De novo donor-specific HLA antibodies (dnDSA) are key factors in the diagnosis of antibody-mediated rejection (ABMR) and related to graft loss. Methods This retrospective study was designed to evaluate the natural course of dnDSA in graft function and kidney allograft survival and to assess the impact of mean fluorescence intensity (MFI...

Background Remote patient management (RPM) in heart failure (HF) patients has been investigated in several prospective randomized trials. The Telemedical Interventional Management in Heart Failure II (TIM-HF2)-trial showed reduced all-cause mortality and hospitalizations in heart failure (HF) patients using remote patient management (RPM) vs. usual...

Background: In the information extraction and natural language processing domain, accessible datasets are crucial to reproduce and compare results. Publicly available implementations and tools can serve as benchmark and facilitate the development of more complex applications. However, in the context of clinical text processing the number of accessi...

Patient care after kidney transplantation requires integration of complex information to make informed decisions on risk constellations. Many machine learning models have been developed for detecting patient outcomes in the past years. However, performance metrics alone do not determine practical utility. Often, the actual performance of medical pr...

Background Transplant glomerulopathy (TG) may indicate different disease entities including chronic AMR (antibody-mediated rejection). However, AMR criteria have been frequently changed, and long-term outcomes of allografts with AMR and TG according to Banff 2017 have rarely been investigated. Methods 282 kidney allograft recipients with biopsy-pr...

Background: Antiviral drugs have shown little impact in patient infected with acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Especially for immunocompromised persons positive for SARS-CoV-2, novel treatments are warranted. Recently, the U.S. FDA has granted an emergency use authorization (EUA) to two monoclonal antibodies (mAb) targeting the viral s...

Real datasets often lack values, compromising the quality of data analyses. Adequate data may be synthetically imputed to replace missing values – a technique known as missing data imputation – avoiding deletion of incomplete observations. Several data imputation methods have been proposed and generative methods based on Artificial Neural Networks...

Background: Arterial stiffness and phase angle (PhA) have gained importance as a diagnostic and prognostic parameter in the management of cardiovascular disease. There are few studies regarding the differences in arterial stiffness and body composition between renal transplant recipients (RTRs) receiving belatacept (BELA) vs. calcineurin inhibitor...

The Banff 2017 report permits the diagnosis of pure chronic antibody-mediated rejection (cAMR) in absence of microcirculation inflammation. We retrospectively investigated renal allograft function and long-term outcomes of 67 patients with cAMR, and compared patients who received antihumoral therapy (cAMR-AHT, n = 21) with patients without treatmen...

Background and objectives The median kidney transplant half-life is 10–15 years. Because of the scarcity of donor organs and immunologic sensitization of candidates for retransplantation, there is a need for quantitative information on if and when a second transplantation is no longer associated with a lower risk of mortality compared with waitlist...

(1) Background: Simultaneous pancreas–kidney transplantation (SPKT) is a standard therapeutic option for patients with diabetes mellitus type I and kidney failure. Early pancreas allograft failure is a complication potentially associated with worse outcomes. (2) Methods: We performed a landmark analysis to assess the impact of early pancreas graft...

Background: Transplant glomerulopathy (TG) is one of the main causes of post-transplant proteinuria (PU). The features and possible risk factors for proteinuria in TG patients are uncertain. Methods: We investigated all patients who had biopsy-proven TG from 2000 to 2018 in our center. The clinical and histological data were compared between two gr...

Real-world datasets often have missing values, which hinders the use of a large number of machine learning (ML) estimators. To overcome this limitation in a data analysis pipeline, data points may be deleted in a data preprocessing stage. However, an alternative better solution is data imputation. Several methods based on Artificial Neural Networks...

Background and Aims Dialysis patients (pts) have an increased risk for hepatitis B (HB) infection and impaired response to HB vaccine compared to the general population. As shown in other studies, patient and graft survival in pts with chronic HB is worse. This study assesses the outcome of HBc-positive patients after kidney transplantation (KTx)....

Background and Aims Patients with chronic kidney disease suffer often from cardiovascular diseases, especially high blood pressure and its complications such as stroke and heart attack. After kidney transplantation, this condition persists and can in addition harm the graft. However, outpatient care surveillance is not ideal to treat high blood pre...

Background and Aims Living donor kidney transplantation [LDKT] is associated with best patient survival and life quality among kidney replacement therapies in case of chronic kidney disease. Yet, numerous previous studies have reported inconsistent results. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of recipient and donor characteristic...

Background Antigen-detecting rapid diagnostic tests (Ag-RDT) for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) offer new opportunities for the quick and laboratory-independent identification of infected individuals for control of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Despite the potential benefits, nasopharyngeal sample collection is frequently p...

Background Antigen-detecting rapid diagnostic tests (Ag-RDT) for SARS-CoV-2 offer new opportunities for the quick and laboratory-independent identification of infected individuals for control of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Despite the potential benefits, nasopharyngeal sample collection is frequently perceived as uncomfortable by patients and requires...

Background Few studies have thoroughly investigated the causes of kidney graft loss (GL), despite its importance. Methods A novel approach assigns each persistent and relevant decline in renal function over the lifetime of a renal allograft to a standardized category, hypothesizing that singular or multiple events finally lead to GL. An adjudicati...

The MACCS (Medical Assistant for Chronic Care Service) platform enables secure sharing of key medical information between patients after kidney transplantation and physicians. Patients provide information such as vital signs, well-being, and medication intake via smartphone apps. The information is transferred directly into a database and electroni...

Background: The number of patients returning to dialysis after graft failure increases. Surprisingly, little is known about the clinical and immunological outcomes of this cohort. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 254 patients after kidney allograft loss between 1997-2017 and report clinical outcomes such as mortality, relisting, retransplant...

Background Renal transplant recipients have an increased cancer risk. The mTOR-inhibitor sirolimus has immunosuppressive and antitumor activities but knowledge about its use in recipients with cancer is limited. Methods We retrospectively analyzed 726 renal allograft recipients converted to sirolimus from 10 German transplant centers. Patient and...

Proteinuria and transplant glomerulopathy (TG) are common in kidney transplantation. To date, there is limited knowledge regarding proteinuria in different types of TG and its relationship to allograft survival. A retrospective cohort analysis of TG patients from indication biopsies was performed to investigate the relationship of proteinuria, hist...

Background De-novo malignancies after kidney transplantation represent one major cause for mortality after transplantation. However, most of the studies are limited due to small sample size, short follow-up or lack of information about cancer specific mortality. Methods This long-term retrospective analysis included all adult patients with complet...

Purpose of review: Although a widely recognized and complex pathophysiological condition, sarcopenic obesity remains less appreciated and may elude diagnosis and workup in both kidney transplant waitlisted candidates and kidney transplant recipients. The lack of consensus definition, and practical diagnostic tools for evaluating waitlisted candida...

eHealth (“electronic” Health) is a new field in medicine that has the potential to change medical care, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. In this review, we analyzed the current status of eHealth in transplantation by performing a PubMed search over the last 5 years with a focus on clinical studies for post‐transplant care. We retrieved 463 ma...

Tools and resources to automatically process clinical text are very limited, particularly outside the English speaking world. As many relevant patient information within electronic health records are described in unstructured text, this is a clear drawback. In order to slightly overcome this problem, we present information extraction models for Ger...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 denotes a global health issue. Data regarding COVID-19 incidence in kidney transplant recipients (KTR) are sparse. From 19 March to 19 May 2020, we performed a systematic screening for COVID-19 in KTR. Tests included serum analysis for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies using S protein-based...

Patienten nach erfolgreicher Nierentransplantation müssen meist einen komplizierten Medikationsplan einnehmen und im Alltag verschiedene Vorgaben beachten. Nicht jedem gelingt dies, was zu kurz-oder langfristigem Verlust der Transplantatfunktion mit der dann notwendigen Wiedereinleitung der Dialyse führen kann. Die Dialyse erzeugt hohe Kosten für d...

Background Sirolimus is an established immunosuppressant in renal transplantation with antineoplastic and antiviral features, but side effects like proteinuria limit its use. The aim of this retrospective multicenter observational study is to define predictors for determining which patients most likely benefit from a sirolimus-based therapy. Metho...

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Background The correct valganciclovir dose for cytomegalovirus (CMV) prophylaxis depends on renal function estimated by the Cockcroft–Gault (CG) estimated creatinine clearance (CG-CrCl) formula. Patients with delayed or rapidly changing graft function after transplantation (tx) will need dose adjustments. Methods We performed a retrospective inves...

The German Sirolimus Study Group has established a database among 10 transplant centers throughout Germany to study the outcomes in 726 renal transplant patients being converted to a sirolimus-containing therapy between 2000 and 2008 with a total of more than 1500 recorded patient years on therapy. In this study, we present a detailed description o...

Virtual Panel Reactive Antibodies (vPRA) has been implemented to gauge sensitization worldwide. It is unclear how it associates with long-term outcomes, and its correlation with peak (pPRA) or actual (aPRA) has not been studied. We retrospectively reviewed data from 18-65 year-old kidney-only transplant patients during 1.1.1996-31.7.2011 in our cen...

The prevalence of acute renal allograft rejection has decreased substantially in past decades due to new and more specific immunosuppressive compounds but improvements in long-term graft function have not been achieved. There is a large need for new immunosuppressive agents that lack toxicity of current agents such as calcineurin inhibitors but sho...