Current Advances in Liver Transplantation

Dear Colleagues,

Current advances in liver transplantation have allowed for improved outcomes in liver transplant recipients. With the advent of effective immunosuppressive therapy, liver transplantation has been the standard of care for end-stage liver disease since the early 1980s. Recent modifications in rules for prioritizing patients and allocating organs has resulted in improved access to organs in regions where donor organs had been historically challenging.

A recent advancement in liver transplantation is the utilization of extracorporeal perfusion technology to improve the quality and function of marginal donor livers and reducing ischemic injury to the liver. Machine perfusion medical advancements in liver transplant include dual hypothermic oxygenated machine perfusion and normothermic machine perfusion.         

Further advancements have occurred regarding indications for liver transplants. Since the introduction of more effective therapeutic options, 5-year survival outcomes in stage IV colon cancer have steadily improved, resulting in heightened interest in offering a liver transplant in patients with liver metastasis. Additionally, the expansion of inclusion criteria for patients with alcohol-associated liver disease—both acute and chronic—have increased transplant access for these critically ill patients. Nevertheless, more research is needed to determine outcomes and recidivism rates in this population. Finally, with increased use of machine learning, artificial intelligence can be used to assist in various standardized algorithms such as optimizing the waitlist patient selection, management and treatment decisions in hepatocellular carcinoma, and enhanced donor–recipient matching to reduce waitlist mortality.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome.

Dr. Raffi Karagozian
Dr. Fredric D. Gordon
Guest Editors

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• liver transplantation for colon cancer metastases
• liver transplantation for cholangiocarcinoma
• living donor liver transplantation
• robotic living donor hepatectomy
• normothermic regional perfusion
• extracorporeal liver machine perfusion
• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• organ allocation
• metabolic associated steatotic liver disease