System for transporting human organs

Abstract

Currently, the human organ transportation plan in Brazil uses free resources available on the Internet, such as maps and search sites aiming at providing the necessary tools for creating a database which assists in the decision making phase of the transportation plan elaboration. The process in question is labor intensive and even significantly time consuming. The use of land transportation is prioritized mainly due to the operational costs involved. Multimodal combinations are used, whenever necessary and aiming at extending the coverage radius to collect organs, reduce loss and enable transplant procedures within a shorter displacement time. After a review of common practices and protocols in force in other countries, this research aims at developing a national system that elaborates transport plans for medical teams, as well as for human organs between donors and recipients, taking into account ischemia time and the applicable legislation. The system - which is called EOS (an allusion to the ancient Greek goddess of the dawn in Greek Mythology) - analyses the displacement options for the harvested organs and medical teams, taking into account single and multimodal transportation combinations and the ischemia time. The system has been developed and tested against the data collected in the State of São Paulo and by using low cost API (Application Programming Interfaces) from Google to get the displacement time between couples of target points of interest, based upon real data extracted from the referred system.