At the University of Toronto a group of researchers have developed a microchip that will help doctors better assess the quality of a potential lung transplant.
According to Professor Shana Kelly, one of the scientists who lead the team that developed the technology, doctors usually only have several hours to decide if they're going to go through with a lung transplant operation.
As a result, 10 to 25 per cent of lung transplant patients begin to suffer from a condition called primary graft dysfunction. While doctors conduct a variety of tests to ensure that a lung is suitable for transplant, these tests do not have the ability to currently catch subtle tissue damage.
In many other fields of medicine, doctors use a technique called "biomarker profiling" to catch the smallest degree of tissue damage. Unfortunately, until now that technique has been too time consuming to conduct in the time doctors had to make a decision on whether to operate.
"This [breakthrough] could help eliminate the leading cause for post-operation death," she says.
Using the data collected from the microchip and with the help of a algorithm Professor Kelly and her team developed, this new technology is able to generate a risk rating for a lung. It's also able to provide this assessment in 20 minutes.
"We hope that this will lead to improved utilization rates for donated organs," says Professor Kelly.
Like most medical breakthroughs, additional testing is required before this technology makes it way to hospital operating rooms.
"We will be running a larger scale validation study to prove out the accuracy of our method, and also building automated instrumentation that will allow the technology to be used anywhere that transplant-related decisions are being made," she says.