Artificial Intelligence for Blood Management

The Instituto Português do Sangue e da Transplantação (IPST) is a public institute of the Ministry of Health, and the recognized authority for the collection and regulation of blood donation and transplantation at the national level.

Operational productivity of IPST is crucial for the blood supply chain in Portugal, since it monitors the quality and safety of donation, procurement, processing, storage, preservation and distribution of human blood, blood components, organs, tissues and human origin cells.

The goal of LAIfeBlood project is to provide IPST with new tools to improve efficiency of blood supply operations in Portugal.

LAIfeBlood project is particularly focused on: (1) extracting temporal and geographical patterns from historical collection and transfusion data; (2) developing predictive models for the expected collections and transfusions in different temporal and geographic areas; and (3) developing software tools to optimize the planning of collections at the national level according to the availability of IPST teams and resources and collection events.

LAIfeBlood project tackles an important societal challenge of maximizing blood services effectiveness while minimizing wastage of an increasingly scarce resource and optimizing the efficiency of blood supply operations. We expect our results to be used to derive implementable policies at IPST to plan collections and manage the daily inventory rebalancing problem, as well as contributing to the development in the field of optimization and dynamic supply chain management.