A dialysis network that publishes what it learns.

Mathematical models, registry design, and algorithmic optimisation of the paired kidney exchange — the research domain that anchored ASTRA's growth into one of India's largest swap transplant registries.

The largest research theme in the AKC portfolio — spanning nine publications across journal papers, international conference proceedings, and preprints. The work builds on the operational ASTRA registry to address the central problem of paired kidney exchange: how to maximise both quantity (number of transplants) and quality (graft survival, fairness) simultaneously, through max-cardinality, max-weight matching on compatibility graphs.

This theme is the academic foundation underneath the 5-way domino chains, multi-registry coordination, and ABO-incompatible-via-swap pathways that have made ASTRA distinctive. It also anchors Utkarsh Verma's doctoral thesis at IIT Bombay IEOR.

Research on optimal sequencing of arteriovenous fistula creation, patency outcomes, and quality-of-life-adjusted access policy — anchored by Manoj Kumar's doctoral thesis and the AKC vascular access programme.

The vascular access theme connects clinical practice with quantitative decision science. Vascular access — the route through which blood flows to and from the dialysis machine — is the single largest determinant of dialysis quality and patient comfort over years on the modality.

AKC's research on vascular access asks: given that a patient on long-term dialysis may need multiple access surgeries over a lifetime, how do we sequence those interventions optimally? The work uses quality-of-life-adjusted patency as the objective and earned the 3rd Prize at the ISN Conference 2021 for its analytical depth.

The use of network-level operational data to make better individual treatment decisions — adequacy, prescription, modality choice. The research stream that translates AKC's Axis EMR dataset into prescriptive analytics.

The treatment-policy research theme is the operational counterpart to the kidney exchange algorithm theme — using AKC's longitudinal patient data to ask which prescribing patterns produce which outcomes, and what a data-driven dialysis prescription protocol would look like.

The work draws on the continuous dataset captured by Axis EMR across more than 220 centres and millions of dialysis sessions, applying operations-research methods to identify treatment trajectories that maximise long-term outcomes.