Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation for Organ Matching

Reducing the shortage of organ donations to meet the demands of patients on the waiting list has being a major challenge in organ transplantation. Because of the shortage, organ matching decision is the most critical decision to assign the limited viable organs to the most “suitable” patients. Currently, organ matching decisions are only made by matching scores calculated via scoring models, which are built by the first principles. However, these models may disagree with the actual post-transplantation matching performance (e.g., patient's post-transplant quality of life (QoL) or graft failure measurements). In this paper, we formulate the organ matching decision-making as a top-N recommendation problem and propose an Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation (AWTR) method. AWTR improves performance of the current scoring models by using limited actual matching performance in historical datasets as well as the collected covariates from organ donors and patients. AWTR sacrifices the overall recommendation accuracy by emphasizing the recommendation and ranking accuracy for top-N matched patients. The proposed method is validated in a simulation study, where KAS [ 60 ] is used to simulate the organ-patient recommendation response. The results show that our proposed method outperforms seven state-of-the-art top-N recommendation benchmark methods.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ISLAMIC AND SOUTH AFRICAN LAW ON LIVING AND CADAVERIC ORGAN DONATIONS: CONSENSUS AND DIVERGENCE

Religion plays a pivotal role in people’s attitude to organ donation. Generally, practising Muslims (adherents of the Islamic faith) are unlikely to consent to organ donation because they believe it is not in keeping with the tenets of Islamic law (Sharī`ah). Although there is a wealth of information on organ donation with reference to both South African and Islamic law, there has not been a study comparing the two sets of laws. The purpose of this article is to develop the literature on living and cadaveric organ donation by drawing a comparison between Islamic law and South African law on this issue. Apart from a few minor differences inherent in each set of laws, there is a startling consensus in South African law and Sunnī (mainstream) Islamic law on the issue of organ donation. This research is also significant in that it provides legal and medical professionals, academics and practitioners with an informed position from which to advise clients and/or patients. This may in turn raise awareness among clients and/or patients, which could result in a desirable increase in organ donation rates among Muslims in South Africa. This article makes a number of recommendations in this regard.

Identity Crisis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

In never Let Me Go, the cloned protagonist proves unable to resist a fate that is finalize by others and 'completion' results in their inevitable death. The uniqueness of theme of organ donations provides the focus of the clone narrator's story. We might expect a showdown scheme where the clones discover their true identity. However, Ishiguro refuses to meet such expectations. Kathy H. and her friends Tommy and Ruth are consumed with questions about themselves and their place in the world. The children attain a sense of identity through their treasured collections, creativity artwork and delicate social structures. Part of their identity therefore always remains a mystery to them and this adds their confusion about who they are and what is their place in the world. No one appear exempt from the harsh reality offered by the ambiguity of human identity.

Introducing an Organ Donor Registry is Saskatchewan

On 3 September 2020, Saskatchewan launched an organ donor registry that allows participants 16 years and older to register their intent to be an organ donor either online or using a paper form. Saskatchewan has historically performed poorly at a national level with low rates of organ donations. Saskatchewan's new registry is intended to increase the numbers of organ donors in the province, while also helping to modernize its organ donation system and ease donation conversations with families. Saskatchewan's introduction of this registry brought the province in line with other provinces and territories across Canada that use similar systems, and provided a response to the surge in public interest around organ donation that followed the Humboldt Bronco bus crash tragedy and related ``Logan Boulet Effect.'' The 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 provincial budgets included dedicated funding for the development and launch of the registry, which was accompanied by a media campaign to increase public awareness. Though it is too early to evaluate the success of the registry, early indications suggest donation rates will be a key evaluation metric. Registries are commonly thought to help increase public awareness of, and support for, organ donation, but improving Saskatchewan's organ donation rates will likely also require companion measures to strengthen the culture and practice of donation in the province.

Introducing an Organ Donor Registry is Saskatchewan

On 3 September 2020, Saskatchewan launched an organ donor registry that allows participants 16 years and older to register their intent to be an organ donor either online or using a paper form. Saskatchewan has historically performed poorly at a national level with low rates of organ donations. Saskatchewan's new registry is intended to increase the numbers of organ donors in the province, while also helping to modernize its organ donation system and ease donation conversations with families. Saskatchewan's introduction of this registry brought the province in line with other provinces and territories across Canada that use similar systems, and provided a response to the surge in public interest around organ donation that followed the Humboldt Bronco bus crash tragedy and related ``Logan Boulet Effect.'' The 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 provincial budgets included dedicated funding for the development and launch of the registry, which was accompanied by a media campaign to increase public awareness. Though it is too early to evaluate the success of the registry, early indications suggest donation rates will be a key evaluation metric. Registries are commonly thought to help increase public awareness of, and support for, organ donation, but improving Saskatchewan's organ donation rates will likely also require companion measures to strengthen the culture and practice of donation in the province.

1650 Is There a Place for Medical Students at Organ Retrieval? 4 Years’ Experience at a Single Centre

Aim Medical students at a hospital with a national organ retrieval service (NORS) had the unique opportunity to attend organ retrieval. This retrospective survey investigated how attendance affected students’ desire to pursue a career in surgery, and what they learnt from the experience. Method Clinical medical students were invited to sign-up to shifts with the regional NORS team. If notified of a potential organ donation event the NORS co-ordinator would inform the medical student, who would then join the retrieval team and travel with them to the donation site. An electronic survey was later distributed to students, whether or not the donation proceeded. This survey collected both quantitative and qualitative information about the students’ experiences. Results 51 responses were collected from students who attended proceeding organ donations between January 2015 and October 2019. 100% of students found it a useful learning experience and would recommend it to their peers. 98% were able to scrub in for the retrieval procedure. Common learning points were improved understanding of the process of organ retrieval (n = 34), and anatomy (n = 15). Following experience of organ retrieval 59% reported being more likely to pursue a career in transplant surgery and 69% reported being more likely to pursue any surgical career. Conclusions Medical students should be included in organ retrieval, as it not only benefits their learning, but also increases interest in surgical careers. Given that only two out of the sixteen UK NORS teams involve medical students currently, there is scope for much greater adoption of student retrieval rotas.

Aliquoting of isobaric labeling reagents for low concentration and single cell proteomics samples

The introduction of isobaric tagging reagents enabled more accurate, high-throughput quantitative proteomics by enabling samples to be multiplexed. One drawback of these workflows is the relative expense of the proprietary chemical reagents, which is often only second to the expense of the instruments themselves. These highly reactive chemical tags are only commercially available in relatively large aliquots compared to the typical amounts of peptides analyzed in proteomic workflows today. Excess reagents are typically disposed of following labeling of small batches or within a few weeks of opening. We present a simple procedure to aliquot commercial isobaric tagging reagents and demonstrate the successful and high efficiency labeling of multiple samples over a period of six months. The samples presented herein were selected as the most diverse samples labeled by prepared aliquots from a single labeling reagent kit. We observe comparable labeling efficiency from 100 microgram to 100 picograms of peptide when labeling samples from both human digest standards, cancer cell lines prepared in-house and from cells directly obtained from organ donations, despite differences in cell type, lysis and digestion. No labeling experiment of whole human proteomics samples achieved less than 92% labeling efficiency over this period. When preparing phosphoproteomic samples from a cancer cell line digest at approximately 6 months from the date of the aliquoting procedure, we observed a decrease in labeling efficiency to approximately 86%, indicating we are approaching the end of the useful lifetime of these prepared aliquots. Over this period, we have effectively reduced the reagent costs of each labeling experiment to less than 10% of the predicted costs when following the manufacturer instructions for use and disposal. While aliquoting of reagents can be performed by hand, we provide a complete template for automatic aliquoting using an affordable liquid handling robot, including plans for 3D printing of parts we have found useful for streamlining this procedure.