A highly diverse team imagining the undiscovered

RENAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Transforming
patient care
through data-driven
innovation

ABOUT THE RENAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

The heart of RRI’s capacity for innovation is our ability to examine complex problems through multiple lenses.

The Renal Research Institute (RRI) is an internationally recognized incubator of ideas, treatment processes, and technologies to improve the lives of kidney patients. RRI’s leadership in data analytics, computational biomedicine and AI, as well as our access to a large patient population, accelerates the pace of scientific discoveries and their translation into applied medicine. Our team includes some of the brightest minds from around the world, who, along with their disciplinary expertise, bring a deep understanding of global healthcare issues and challenges.

 

Our Research

We operate at the intersection of clinical data, machine data, and real-world practice, with access to a large patient population and one of the world's largest and richest renal datasets. Our deep connection to the scientific community and to med-tech innovators gives us the rare ability to translate insight into action—quickly, precisely, and meaningfully.

 

Latest Research & News

Latest Research

  • Sheng-Han Yueh, Jochen Raimann, Bernard Canaud, Meijiao Zhou, Xiaoling Ye, Ariella Mermelstein, Jeroen Kooman, Frank van der Sande, Len Usvyat, Peter Kotanko, Hanjie Zhang

    RESULTSModels including BIS data showed excellent accuracy (R2 > 0.85), models excluding BIS features achieved inferior performance (R2 = 0.73-0.81). In models using BIS inputs, recent bioimpedance changes dominated feature importance. Models without BIS data relied primarily on urea distribution volume, age, and height.CONCLUSIONThese findings indicate that fluid volume compartments can be reliably estimated from routinely collected clinical data and history BIS measurements, offering valuable support for interim assessment of fluid status between scheduled BIS measurements.METHODUsing adult patients from the MONitoring Dialysis Outcomes (MONDO) 2012 cohort, we developed predictive models to estimate fluid volume compartments based on demographic data, laboratory values, treatment parameters, and multi-frequency whole-body bioimpedance spectroscopy (BIS) measurements. Clinical features were aggregated over an up-to-90-day look-back window, yielding 18,600 patients and 162,479 dialysis treatments. eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models were trained and tested using patient-level splits, with parallel models built either incorporating or excluding prior BIS measurements.BACKGROUNDOptimized fluid management is crucial in dialysis care because extracellular volume overload drives adverse cardiovascular outcomes. At the same time, comorbidities such as inflammation and protein energy wasting lead to decreased muscle mass and intracellular water. Accurate assessment of total body water (TBW) and its extracellular water (ECW) and intracellular water (ICW) compartments is therefore essential to guide ultrafiltration, evaluate dialysis adequacy, and monitor patient risk.

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Latest News

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Program

LATEST EPISODE

Beyond the Equation | Dr. Amaka Eneanya on Kidney Function, Clinical Change, and Communication

March 2, 2026

In this episode of Frontiers in Kidney Medicine and Biointelligence, host Len Usvyat, MD, is joined by Amaka Eneanya, MD, MPH, FASN, Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and former Chief Transformation Officer at Emory Healthcare. Dr. Eneanya reflects on kidney function estimation, the evolution of clinical tools in nephrology, and the role of communication, patient perspectives, and digital platforms in shaping medical discourse. This episode offers an in-depth discussion on how research findings move from theory into real-world clinical practice.