Tuomas Sandholm’s work since 2010 to improve the fairness and effectiveness of organ donations using PSC supercomputers has won the 2023 AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity.
Tag: Organ Donor
Penn Medicine Launches New Center for Living Donation to Increase Transplant Opportunities for Those in Need of Livers or Kidneys
The Penn Transplant Institute at Penn Medicine has opened a new Center for Living Donation which will expand Penn’s exceptional care for living donors, helping to maximize the number of lives saved through liver and kidney transplantation. For the thousands waiting on a lifesaving organ, living donation—when a living person donates an organ, or part of an organ, for transplantation to another person—can help those in need receive life-saving care sooner.
Lung Ventilation after Death May Keep Organs Healthy for Transplantation for Hours
Article title: Rapid postmortem ventilation improves donor lung viability by extending the tolerable warm ischemic time after cardiac death in mice Authors: Junyi Yu, Che Xu, Janet S. Lee, Jonathan K. Alder, Zongmei Wen, Guifang Wang, Agustin Alejandro Gil Silva,…
Mount Sinai Surgeons Perform First Human Tracheal Transplant Surgery
Historic case launches Mount Sinai’s Tracheal Transplant Program for treating patients worldwide, including those with severe intubation damage after COVID-19
To Increase Organs Available for Transplantation, Reassess Organ Procurement Organizations’ Metrics
In a new paper, published in JAMA Surgery, researchers found the metrics used to rank organ procurement organizations don’t create an even playing field for organizations, and lead to inaccuracies.

University Hospitals Employee Offers to Donate Kidney within Ten Minutes of Meeting Patient in Need
Erika Hosey, a cardiovascular technician at University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center, ended the year by giving a life-changing gift to a patient in need. While performing a routine cardiac stress test, she drummed up a conversation. She learned that her patient, Denise Butvin, had kidney disease and needed transplant surgery.
“Erika just blurted out…I’ll give you my kidney,” said Butvin. “I was in shock. I couldn’t believe this was real.”
While Butvin is a positive person, she has been through an emotional rollercoaster of ups and downs and on waitlists in Ohio and Pennsylvania for five years. Her family and friends were not an organ match. Both her sister and father were on dialysis for many years and passed away from kidney disease, so she knew how pressing this transplant surgery was.
Hosey started the process the next day, and after a few weeks of testing turned out to be a perfect donor match. “To be a kidney donor match for someone is really a shot in the dark,” she

Living Liver Transplant Program to Increase Availability of Organs
Vanderbilt University Medical Center is launching a living liver donor transplant program, significantly increasing the number of available organs for life-saving transplants