Kidney-pancreas Transplantation: Assessment of Key Imaging Findings in the Acute Setting

For patients with diabetes, insulin therapy can be an effective treatment for years. However, many diabetics eventually develop complications from the disease, including neuropathy, amputations, atherosclerosis, and kidney failure. While kidney failure can be managed with dialysis, difficulties with monitoring fluid intake and diet, bone loss, anemia, and venous access can be problematic for the patient. Due to the decreased life expectancy and difficulties of medical management of patients with diabetes and renal failure, combined renal-pancreas transplantation is an increasingly used option available to type 1 diabetics with concurrent renal failure due to refinements of surgical technique and immunosuppressive therapy. Due to the increasing number of kidney-pancreas transplant patients, longer post-transplant survival, and increasing number of hospitals performing the procedure, more transplant patients are having their care increasingly shifted away from the major transplant centers to general community hospitals. In many kidney-pancreas transplants patients who present to the emergency department for suspected transplant dysfunction, imaging plays a critical initial role in their diagnosis and management. Therefore, it has become increasingly important that community and emergency department radiologists be able to recognize the normal imaging appearance of renal-pancreas transplants and to identify acute findings.