A fully automated normothermic machine perfusion system for kidney grafts supporting physiological motivated flow profiles

Abstract

Research showed that the normothermic machine perfusion of kidneys can enable prolonged storage and improve conditions compared to traditional cold storage. For research in this area, there is a demand for a long-term in vitro perfusion setup. In this work, we present a fully automated normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) system as an experimental research platform. The perfusion system is intended as a tool for researching the effects of different perfusion strategies on the kidney. To enable the automation, the NMP system consists of a blood pressure control, a circulation volume level control and a pH-regulation component. The setup is realized as a medical cyber-physical system consisting of networked embedded microcontroller nodes.