Using CARREL + to Increase Availability of Human Organs for Transplantation

Abstract

The shortage of human organs for transplantation is a serious problem, and is exacerbated by the fact that current organ selection and assignment processes discard a significant number of organs deemed non-viable (not suitable) for transplantation. However, these processes ignore the fact that medical specialists may disagree as to whether an organ is viable or not. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel organ selection process in which transplant physicians, who may be geographically dispersed, deliberate over the viability of an organ. This argument-based deliberation is formalized in amulti-agent system - CARREL+ - that requires the deliberation to adhere to formal rigorous standards acknowledging the safety critical nature of the domain. We believe that this new selection process has the potential to increase the number of organs that current selection processes make available for transplantation, and thus reduce the increasing gap between the demand for and supply of human organs.