Lifeina, Organ Transplants, and AI

Organ transplants is one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, and saves thousands of lives every day. With the help of organ donors, who are the real heroes of this industry, the supply of organs offers a second chance of life to the beneficiaries.

The need for organ donors has never been greater. In the USA, in 2016, 22 people die every day waiting for a transplant. More than 117,000 people on the national transplant waiting list in the United States alone. A new person is added to this list every 10 minutes.

A significant percentage of transplants fail due to inadequate transportation methods. When the sampling procedure is set up, every minute counts. Between the moment the organ is removed and the time it is transplanted, it should not exceed 3 to 4 hours for a heart, 12 to 18 hours for a liver, 6 to 8 hours for a lung, 24 to 36 hours for a kidney. These delays are averages that depend on the state of the organ. Nevertheless, the shorter the delay, the better the result of the transplant.

The idea that we can take somebody’s organs and transplant them inside another person’s body is simply amazing.

Yet, the technique and technology used are still in their infancy. It is dependent on many factors.

The technology used today is prehistoric

One of the bottlenecks in organ transplants is transport. Today, when they transport an organ, they basically put it in a plastic cooler box, with ice cubes, and they run as fast as possible. I’m exaggerating a little, but basically the technology is prehistoric.

Every year in the US between 1000 and 1200 people die following an organ transplant in the US because the organ has been badly transported. So that’s what we’re working on right now. We’ve just released a first product, the LifeinaBioBag, made from aerogel, that gives us a perfectly stable temperature. The LifeinaBioBag is a really simple product, and all it does is to keep a perfectly flat temperature for about 90 hours. It’s basically just a replacement for the plastic box filled with ice, just better, because it gives a flat temperature.

But there is another problem in organ transplants, which is not just to keep the organ at the right temperature, but also to make it live longer.

Out of 100 hearts donated, only 27 are used!!!

From 100 hearts that are donated, only 27% are used. 73% are simply thrown away or used for research. That is because the heart can only stay viable for 4 hours outside the body.

So how do we extend this time? Right now, just by providing a perfectly stable environment, a perfectly flat temperature, we estimate that we should be able to increase that time by about 25%, so that should give us about 6 hours.

But more interestingly, we are now working on the idea of “ex-vivo perfusion”, where we place the heart in a stable environment, and then pump oxygenated liquid through it to keep it alive. It sounds a bit Frankenstein-like, but basically, we are trying to keep the organ ALIVE.

If we manage to keep the heart alive for 12 hours, we will completely eliminate the shortage of hearts all over the world. Now that’s a cool reason to wake up in the morning…

So how does artificial intelligence work with this?

We first needed to focus on the technology tools, but then we need to use them properly, and that is where artificial intelligence comes in.

There used to be only three ways for you to get a transplant. The first was to find a healthy person from your friends and family, who’s perfectly matched your blood and tissue types, and possesses a spare organ (like a kidney) he or she was willing to part with. Now this obviously only works for kidneys, because that is the only organ that you can spare.

The second was to wait for the unexpected death of a stranger who was a suitable physical match and happened to have the organ-donor box checked on their driver’s license.

The third was to die…

'Organ mismatch' is one of the primary reasons why the gap between organ donor and receiver exists.

But given enough transplant patients, and enough healthy, willing donors, we could form a pool big enough to facilitate far more matches than in the past.

So that’s where AI comes in. And it’s already proving to be incredibly successful in kidney transplants. The current AI programs only focus on kidneys, because kidneys are basically an easy transplant, and a kidney is kind off indestructible.

Paired kidney donation is one of the great success stories of artificial intelligence. It doesn’t eliminate jobs or replace human skills from medical care but allows for instant intelligent match between recipient and donor.  It’s called the Paired Kidney Exchange program and is popular in the US and Canada.

AI takes an incredibly complex problem and solves it faster and with fewer errors than humans can, and as a result saves more lives. Since the first paired kidney exchange surgeries took place in 2000, nearly 6,000 people have received kidney transplants from paired exchanges identified by algorithms. Today roughly one in eight transplant recipients who receives a kidney from a living donor is matched with that person through paired exchange.

Using AI algorithms, the system helps match patients in need of a kidney to those willing to donate one. 

We are today working on new approaches in Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence to predict the success of possible donor-recipient matches and transplant outcomes for other organs.

So we’re developing a deep learning system to identify the best potential for donor-recipient matches for organ transplants. Based on publicly available data, these matches are labelled as a “good” or “bad” based on the organ survival times. This dataset will then be used to train a model which can be used for identifying better matches.

Today this program is still in its infancy, but we believe that within the next 5 to 10 years, about 80% in of all organ transplants will be AI-driven in the US and Canada. Today, Lifeina is still focused more on the nuts and bolts, developing the technology that will then be paired with AI. But it’s so much fun.

The bottom line is that in the next few years we will use AI to identify optimal donors for a given recipient, worldwide.

Discover Lifeina and the world of organ transplants on www.lifeina.com