The social structure of Organ transplantation in the United States

As of today, 110,629 Americans are waiting for an organ transplant yet in 2010 only 28,664 people received organ transplants. This fact alone demonstrates that the country is facing a shortage of organs. Numbers such as these make it absolutely clear that we need to be looking for improvements in the organ allocation system in the USA. Before one starts proposing new allocation systems, it is crucial to understand the structure of the current system. In spite of availability of data on transplants, to our knowledge, no proper analysis has been done using the data. This paper looks at this data and what it may reveal about the allocation process currently in place. In order to structure the data we used techniques from network sciences to create a network of locations (henceforth called a geographical social network) representing all the transplants in the USA since 1987 where nodes represent states in the USA. This social structure is then analyzed using techniques from network sciences to bring clarity to the organ donation process.