Inspiration Exchange: ML to transform organ transplantation

The van der Schaar Lab’s fourteenth Inspiration Exchange session took place virtually on January 7, 2022, and was attended by students and professionals from the AI and machine learning community.

This was a particularly application-oriented session on ML tools for organ transplantation (one of the lab’s key research impact areas).

To start the session, clinician Alexander Gimson framed the importance and complexity of organ transplantation as a domain, and gave a quick overview of some of his collaborative projects with the lab to date.

Ph.D. student Jeroen Berrevoets then introduced OrganITE and OrganSync, two new ML-powered approaches to organ transplantation problems such as transplant benefit prediction, matchmaking, and queueing. Research engineer Bogdan Cebere presented a demonstrator for OrganBoard, a clinician-oriented survival prediction and matchmaking tool for organ transplantation. Finally, postdoc Fergus Imrie and PhD. student Yuchao Qin presented iTransplant, a machine learning project aiming to understand and improve decision-making around accepting and rejecting organs.

The session wrapped up with a short roundtable with a panel of clinical collaborators (all of whom are transplantation experts) and a brief audience Q&A.

Introduction – 0:00
Welcome message from Mihaela van der Schaar – 5:09
Presentation by Dr. Alexander Gimson [organ transplantation – importance and complexity] – 7:21
Presentation by Jeroen Berrevoets [matchmaking & queueing] – 14:31
Presentation by Bogdan Cebere [OrganBoard demonstrator] – 31:37
Presentation by Fergus Imrie and Yuchao Qin [transplantation decision-making] – 37:31
Clinician roundtable – 46:40
Audience Q&A – 1:01:35
Intro to next sessions – 1:08:08

For a high-level overview on machine learning for organ transplantation, click here.

A full list of the lab’s publications can be found here.