Surgeons from Australia have transplanted a heart that has already stopped beating. The "dead heart" transplant is the first of its kind in the world.

Usually, when heart transplants happen, they take the heart from a brain-dead patient who still has a beating heart. It is usually directly taken or placed on ice for a while before the surgery.

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However, a team from St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney had transplanted a heart that had already stopped beating for 20 minutes. Afterwards, they were able to revive it within their patient.

For the revolutionary procedure, they used a device called "heart-in-a-box" in order to revive the dead heart.

With this device, the heart is kept warm and the heartbeat is restored with a nourishing fluid. This helps reduce the damage done to the heart muscle.

The first patient, Michelle Gribilas, is a 57-year old woman who commented that after the procedure, she felt that she was now a different person. She said she felt as if she were 40 again.

Her surgery was done almost two months ago.

Since then, there have been two more successful operations.

According to Professor Peter MacDonald, the head of St. Vincent's heart transplant unit, this is a significant advance in the field and can be seen as a major breakthrough that can reduce the shortage of donor organs.

Since the heart-in-a-box does not require hearts to be fresh right before the surgery, this could save up to 30% more lives by increasing the number of available organs.

This is also good for the patients, as they will not need to wait for an available donor so much.

It is currently being tested at sites around the world.

The process of warming the organ using a device though has already been used to improve the quality of lung and liver transplants.

If the technology were to be adapted as standard practice, there is no telling how many lives could be saved each year. 

Tagsdead heart, Heart-in-a-box, transplant, St. Vincent's Hospital