Kidney stone disease research is the focus of a five-year, $7.37 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) RC2 grant awarded to Vanderbilt University Medical Center and led by Vanderbilt urologist Ryan Hsi, MD, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatric urologist Gregory Tasian, MD.
The project will create the Urinary Stone Disease Hub, known as USDHub, with de-identified patient data from over 230,000 individuals with kidney stone disease across nine health systems in the U.S.
USDHub will combine medical expertise across adult and pediatric urology and nephrology, informatics and AI to establish a novel, accessible and usable data resource. It will include clinically important information from CT images, clinical notes, stone composition, and 24-hour urine labs, which are not available in existing databases.
The work also will highlight the collaborative relationships between VUMC and Vanderbilt University, through the use of the ImageVU resource, led by Bennett Landman, PhD, Stevenson Chair of Engineering and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“We have worked with amazing collaborators across VU and VUMC to develop image-processing technologies to perform 3D mapping of individual patients’ kidneys without changing current clinical practices,” said Landman, also an associate professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences.
“The USDHub will transform kidney research through massive-scale mapping of 3D kidney anatomy across the lifespan, with nine clinical sites and over 200,000 patients. Our extended team’s combined efforts will provide rich new insights into the causes and potential interventions for kidney stones,” he said.
Even though about 1 in 11 Americans report having a kidney stone in their lifetime, there is evidence that many people have kidney stones and don’t even know it. Up to 10-15% of people will find out they have kidney stones when they get a CT for an unrelated reason like screening for cancer, Hsi said.
“We live in the ‘stone belt’ in the South and the prevalence of stone disease is higher here based on environmental and lifestyle factors,” Hsi said. “We know that stone disease is more common in warmer climates; it is also linked to diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome, which are common in the Southeast U.S.”
The other seven sites involved are part of the STAR and PEDSnet, which are two PCORnet research networks that have standardized electronic health record data. They include University of North Carolina, Medical University of South Carolina, Duke University, Texas Children’s Hospital, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
The research is funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (grant 1RC2DK140865-01).