Laura Barisoni, MD, professor of Pathology and Medicine, director of the Renal Pathology Service and co-director of the division of AI and Computational Pathology, presented at the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) Kidney Week meeting, attended by over 12,000 nephrologists and nephropathologists from Nov. 2-5, 2023, in Philadelphia, PA.
She was invited to give a lecture titled “Enhancing the Classification of FSGS & MCD with Digital and Computational Pathology” during the session “Nephrotic Syndrome: From Structural Classification to Molecular Basis.”
Focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) and Minimal Change Disease (MCD) represent a spectrum of glomerular diseases known as podocytopathies - a group of very heterogeneous diseases -because they are due to podocyte injury, a cell part of the glomerular filtration barrier. Podocytopathies manifest clinically with proteinuria and nephrotic syndrome. Current classification systems don’t capture the complexity and heterogeneity of their clinical and morphologic manifestations.
The work Barisoni presented recapitulated some of the multidisciplinary research she’s conducting under her R01 grant for her research proposal, “Computational Pathology of Proteinuric Diseases.” In this study, she uses computational image analysis to identify digital biomarkers of disease progression and to stratify patients into clinically and biologically relevant classes.
As a result of her numerous collaborations aiming to use digital and computational pathology to study kidney diseases, she has co-authored a total of eight accepted abstracts, two of which were selected as oral presentations, with the remaining six presented as posters.
Barisoni was also invited to serve as a moderator at the meeting for an oral presentation session titled “Kidney Pathology: From Classic Clinicopathologic Studies to Computational Pathology.”