Doctors at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney said they performed three successful transplants of hearts that had “naturally stopped beating in the donor, rather than using the typical method of removing donor hearts from patients who are brain-dead but still have cardiovascular function,” reports CNN.
The pioneering heart transplant surgery, were done in the past three months. The donor hearts had stopped beating for as long as 20 minutes before surgeons were able to remove them from the patients.
