Current Situation With Organ Donation and Transplantation in China: Application of Machine Learning.

BACKGROUND:China ranks currently as one of the top countries for organ transplantation according to types, capacity, related research, quality, and quantity of procedures. However, the management systems struggle to support these practices. This study aims to review the current situation with organ donation and transplantation in China recently. METHODS:Data about organ donation and transplantation was collected by using web crawler technology from several news sections of representative portal websites in China. A total of 3475 documents about organ donation and transplantation were analyzed after data preprocessing. The documents were analyzed using machine learning to find out the relationship among the hot topics and their social popularity as well as to explore the dominant subtopics of the hot topics. RESULTS:The results of weighted correlation network analysis and documents clustering analysis identified 9 topics about organ donation and transplantation in China with a wide discussion: transplantation ethics, donor compensation, use of the remains, transportation guarantee of living organs, organ allocation, relevant national standards of organ donation and transplantation, legislation on organ donation, penalties for violation, and the Red Cross Society of China. CONCLUSIONS:This study found out the main problems and proposed them for future discussion with organ donation and transplantation system in China: the lack of publicity and education and the difficulty of standardizing legislation about ethical issues arousing ethical problems; the need to understand the relationship and the standardization among costs, expenses, and compensation; and the lack of more support from the government and public to ensure regular organ donation and transplantation.