Transforming organ donation and transplantation: challenges, innovations, and future directions

Organ donation and transplantation has been one of the most important parts of the modern healthcare system that deals with the end-stage organ failure and enhances quality of life and patient survival. But the existing problems of donor scarcity, lack of efficiency in donors usage, mismatches in different organs, regional imbalance, logistic problems and uncoordinated data sharing system have been still a hindrance in the success of the transplantation systems and it is a critical observation of the present situation in the field of organ donation and transplantation which is justified by data analysis of the tendencies in the usage of the donors, tendencies in organ transplantation and regional differences. The paper also outlines the major challenges in the current systems and the new technologies that will be able to revolutionize the transplantation processes such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and Big Data Analytics. At the same time, new technologies that would help to extend the "liveness" of organs are also carefully analysed as potential ways to simplify the choices, improve the transparency and logistics. While there are solutions to these technologies, some barriers to the technologies are interoperability, governance, ethical issues and the availability of infrastructure. Lastly, the paper provides the research directions in the future, which revolve around convergence of heterogeneous technologies, development of interoperable data ecosystems and the necessity of having equitable and patient-centered transplantation systems. Overall, this review provides an in-depth opinion of the problems, innovations, and directions that need to be introduced to transform organ donation and transplantation into a more efficient, transparent, and accessible healthcare sector on the international scale.