Multimodal learning for organ transplant diagnostics

This seminar was delivered on 14 September 2026. For more information: https://spds.sydney.edu.au/ Speaker: Harry Robertson, University of Sydney Abstract: Kidney transplantation remains the only solution for end-stage renal failure, yet chronic immune injury and reactive monitoring limit long-term graft survival and patient quality of life. Current strategies to monitor patients are reactive and require invasive biopsies to diagnose allograft dysfunction. These biopsies are assessed by semi-quantitative criteria with known between-reader variability. This thesis develops 1) a blood test for allograft rejection and 2) a co-pilot for renal biopsy assessment. To develop our blood test, we first assembled PROMAD, the largest transcriptomic resource in the field, spanning more than 150 studies and 12,000 samples across kidney, heart, liver and lung transplantation. By developing TOP, a novel transfer learning framework, we produced an organ-agnostic blood test that predicts biopsy-proven rejection (AUC=0.81), outperforming the current standard-of-care. Next, we developed RenalAgent an AI co-pilot that reads kidney biopsies, scores lesions and produces evidence-linked reports. Across 15,082 biopsies from Mass General Brigham (MGB), RenalAgent achieved high concordance with expert pathologists (mean kappa=0.73 across 16 tasks). In external cohorts from Australia, Europe, and Mt Sinai (US), RenalAgent demonstrated prognostic utility through longitudinal assessment, predicting graft loss better than the current standard-of-care. Together, these contributions aim to advance precision monitoring for transplant recipients. About the speaker: Harry completed his undergraduate degree in applied medical science at the University of Sydney in 2021. During his PhD he received a Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship, and in 2024 a Fulbright Future Scholarship to study under Prof. Faisal Mahmood at Harvard. His work has been published in Nature Medicine.