Organ donation after circulatory death: rapidly scaling on bad data and intuition

The use of organs from donation after cardiac death (DCD) donors has increased dramatically in recent years. Despite an influx of billions of dollars in capital and innovative new technologies in organ preservation, the transplant community’s ability to accurately assess organ quality is limited by an inability to make use of already available data. DCD donation imposes certain ischemic stress on the organs and minute-to-minute changes in vital signs or other clinical parameters can mean the difference between a good or bad outcome for patients. We are looking for a partnership to help address this problem and create new solutions to model long term organ function after kidney and liver transplant. 

We hope this e-HAIL session results in ideas for grant aims and potential collaborative avenues to blend expertise in transplant surgery with machine learning research for a R01 submission in June 2024. We have detailed patient level data, including long-term recipient outcomes and organ function, linked to detailed data for each organ donor. This includes donor characteristics and minute-to-minute vital sign data from the time of withdrawal of life support to organ donation. For kidney transplant alone, we estimate that the data represent tens of thousands of donor and recipient pairs over the past decade. We are open to any approaches that both address the clinical problem + create new analytical tools.

Zoom information will be sent to e-HAIL members.