Ariel Bogle at Mashable :”When Bob Jones performed one of Victoria’s first liver transplants in 1988, he could not imagine that 29 years later he’d be talking about artificial intelligence and online dating. Jones is the director of Austin Health’s Victorian liver transplant unit in Melbourne, Australia, and along with his colleague Lawrence Lau, he has helped develop an algorithm that could potentially better match organ donors with organ recipients.
Comparing it to the metrics behind dating site eHarmony, Jone said they planned to use the specially-designed AI to improve the accuracy of matching liver donors and recipients, hopefully resulting in less graft failures and fewer patient deaths.
“It’s a specially designed machine learning algorithm using multiple donor and recipient features to predict the outcome,” he explained.
The team plugged around 25 characteristics of donors and recipients into their AI, using the data points to retrospectively predict what would happen to organ grafts.
“We used all the basic things like sex, age, underlying disease, blood type,” he said. “And then there are certain characteristics about the donor … and all the parameters that might indicate the liver might be upset.”
Using the AI to assess the retrospective results of 75 adult patients who’d had transplants, they found the method predicted graft failure 30 days post-transplant at an accuracy of 84 percent compared to 68 percent with current methods.
“It really meant for the first time we could assess an organ’s suitability in a quantitive way,” he added, “as opposed to the current method, which really comes down to the position of the doctor eyeballing all the data and making a call based on their experience.”
Improving the accuracy of organ donor matches is vital, because as Jones put it, “it’s an extraordinary, precious gift from one Australian to another.”…(More)”