Deceased donor (heart dead donor)
Sometimes a patient suffers a serious brain injury and carries a poor neurological outcome but fails to meet the strict criteria defining brain death in that there is still detectible brain function. In these circumstances, the patient's family may decide to withdraw life-sustaining medical support with the intention of allowing the patient to die. In this scenario, death is not defined by brain death but rather cardiac death.
An urgent operation is then performed to preserve and remove organs for transplantation. This mode of cardiac death, in contrast to brain death, results in increased injury to the organs during two time periods. The first period is that between withdrawal of life support and death. As the donor's breathing and circulation deteriorates, the organs may no longer be receiving sufficient oxygen. The second time period constitutes the minutes immediately after death and until the organs are flushed with preservation solution and cooled. As a result, livers procured from cardiac death donors are associated with an increased risk of primary non function or poor early organ function, hepatic artery thrombosis, and biliary complications
We can get liver only if the family of patient wishes to donate the person's organs before discontinuing life support.
After removal from the donor (a process called liver retrieval) the liver can safely be kept preserved outside the body in special preservation solutions for 12-15 hours.
Adults usually receive the entire liver from a deceased donor. Child recipient more often receive a portion of a liver from an adult donor. Occasionally, an adult liver is split into two portions and given to two different recipients. For example, the smaller left lobe may be given to a child and the larger right lobe given to an adult.