Surgical Technique of the Abdominal Organ Procurement

The intention of this book is to promote a surgical technique of abdominal organ procurement in order to avoid organ damage and thus enhance the quality of retrieved organs. Organ procurement from a brain death donor is an essential part of organ tra- plantation. In donors where more than one organ is removed, the surgical procedure is critically important and could be challenging both for the procurement and recipient surgeons. Surgical injury or inadequate preservation of organs at this stage may cause irreversible organ damage or can lead to serious complications in the recipient. Nowadays, local or regional surgical teams, whereby the transplant surgeon is not always one of the team members, perform most multiorgan donor (MOD) procurement procedures. To trust each other and to avoid surgical mistakes, a- quate training and standardization of the surgical techniques is required. Teaching and training future procurement surgeons to adopt a standard operating procedure could be the right way to prevent technical mistakes and damage during abdominal multiorgan procurement. I hope that in the near future, every transplant surgeon involved in organ procurement will have to be certified. The different national and international transplant organi- tions in Europe have been already started to establish the teaching programs, which will lead to high expertise in the field of abdominal organ procurement.