Evidence map›Paper›PMID 41520040›Full record

ArticleNPJ digital medicine2026

KT-LLM: an evidence-grounded and sequence text framework for auditable kidney transplant modeling.

Haofeng Zheng, Zihuan Luo, Kaiming He, Wangtianxu Zhou, Zhiyi Kong, Jieyi Dong, Qingfu Dai, Qiquan Sun

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Article in NPJ digital medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

8 authors.

Haofeng Zheng *Department of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Zihuan Luo *Department of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Kaiming He *Department of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Wangtianxu ZhouDepartment of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Zhiyi KongDepartment of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Jieyi DongDepartment of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Qingfu DaiDepartment of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Qiquan SunDepartment of Renal Transplantation, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China. sunqiquan@gdph.org.cn.

Funding

Noncommunicable Chronic Diseases-National Science and Technology Major Project 2025ZD0547500NSFC Incubation Project of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital KY0120220048Science and Technology Projects in Guangzhou 2023B03J1250the National Natural Science Foundation of China 82200843
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

We address a critical clinical gap in real-world kidney transplantation (KT), the long-standing disconnect between structured longitudinal follow-up and text-defined clinical rules, which often leads to inconsistent reporting, poor policy compliance, and non-reproducible outcomes across centers. To resolve this, we introduce KT-LLM, a verifiable orchestration layer that bridges sequence modeling with policy and terminology-aware reasoning, tailoring explicitly to KT clinical workflows. KT-LLM ensures clinical decision-making is grounded in authority by constraining knowledge access to Banff kidney allograft pathology references, OPTN, and SRTR policy documents via retrieval-augmented generation. This design anchors answers and computable checklists to versioned sources, enabling full auditability and reducing subjective interpretation errors. The system coordinates three clinically focused, auditable agents: (i) Agent-A (SRTR-MambaSurv): Optimizes discrete-time survival and competing risk prediction from TRF-aligned trajectories via a linear-time inference backbone to personalize follow-up scheduling; (ii) Agent-B (OPTN-BlackClust): identifies clinically distinct population subtypes using stable deep embedded clustering, supporting individualized treatment stratification; (iii) Agent-C (Policy-Ops): encodes OPTN and UNOS submission timelines, SRTR reporting cadence, and Banff terminology into executable rules, returning pass, warn and fail outcomes with versioned evidence to ensure policy compliance. On de-identified OPTN and UNOS cohorts, KT-LLM outperformed strong baselines in evidence attribution and predictive calibration. Critically, it retained the ability to surface clinically distinct subgroups among Black recipients, which aligns with prior reports of outcome heterogeneity, while avoiding overgeneralization of claims beyond the analyzed window. This supports equitable subgroup analysis while avoiding clinical overreach. By anchoring reasoning and outputs to versioned policies and terminology, KT-LLM transforms the model to govern KT workflows into an auditable, clock-synchronized process. This offers a practical solution to enhance reproducibility, monitor fairness across centers and eras, and standardize clinical practice, addressing unmet needs for scalable, reliable KT care in real-world settings.

Identifiers

PMID41520040
PMCPMC12891658

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.