Dr. Pouyan Motamed displays a prototype sensor at the heart of MetaboSense, a device that was developed to monitor the health of donated lungs prior to transplantation.
Waterloo Engineering researchers and medical clinicians are collaborating on a testing tool to help assess the viability of donated lungs and potentially improve patient outcomes in transplant cases.
The new device, called MetaboSense, was developed during a joint project involving Waterloo researchers and doctors at the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, including its leading lung transplant program.
Life-saving intervention for people with end-stage lung disease is now limited by a shortage of donor organs, with 80 per cent or more of them rejected for use by doctors based on assessments of their function.
One of the key measures involves laboratory testing of glucose and lactate levels in a solution used to provide nutrients to donated lungs while they are maintained outside the body in a machine pioneered at the UHN almost two decades ago.
MetaboSense was developed to continuously monitor those levels and provide doctors with much more timely, detailed information than they now rely on from hourly, labour-intensive sampling and laboratory analysis.
“Our work shows that important metabolic changes can take place in the gaps between manual, hourly samples,” said Dr. Mahla Poudineh, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Canada Research Chair in Health Monitoring BioNano Devices at Waterloo.
“Following a lung’s metabolic trajectory continuously, rather than hourly, would give transplant teams more and better evidence with which to potentially decide whether to accept or decline it for transplantation.”
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