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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Portable finger-probe device can successfully measure liver function in potential organ donors

• http://www.sciencedaily.com

Working with OneLegacy, the non-profit organ and tissue recovery organization serving the greater Los Angeles area, UCLA researchers measured liver function in 53 potential organ donors in a blind study of the device. Eleven livers were declined because of poor quality and the other 42 were transplanted and their function tested later to compare to the results obtained using the device, said study first author Dr. Ali Zarrinpar, an assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Liver and Pancreas Transplantation.

"This device is best single predictor of organ survival in our patients," Zarrinpar said. "Ultimately, what it does is gives us a quantitative measure of how good a liver is without having to visually inspect the organ. It gives us a measurement to talk about when we're thinking about whether to transplant an organ into a recipient."

The study appears in the early online edition of the Journal of Surgical Research.

Although there are accurate and reliable function tests for other donor organs, this is not the case for livers, Zarrinpar said.

Currently, depending on a thorough assessment of a potential donor's medical history, multiple blood tests and any hospital treatments, a surgical team from the recipient's medical center is dispatched to the donor's location to visually inspect and potentially procure the organ. That team costs thousands of dollars per procedure, Zarrinpar said, and about 10 to 15 percent of the time the organ is deemed unusable.

On the flip side, an organ from a patient with a questionable history or borderline laboratory results may be considered a waste of the surgical team's time and the retrieval effort abandoned. However, this device could easily be used to test organ function in such marginal donors, so its use could increase of number of organs used for transplant.


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