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Brain death implies the complete cessation of activity in both cerebral hemispheres and in the brainstem; this leads to severe physiopathological disorders that make donor maintenance complex and involve the concomitant risk of rapid organ deterioration. The heart is one of the target organs in this process of multiple organ failure. Myocardial stunning occurs due to a "catecholamine storm" and subsequent release of many proinflammatory mediators, free oxygen radicals, and electrolyte imbalance secondary to insipid diabetes and hypothermia. Cardiac arrest during the maintenance of a donor after brain death is relatively frequent. The shortage of organs for transplantation has led to the broadening of the criteria for organ donation to include donation after cardiac death or non heart beating donation, among others.

Maintaining organ viability from extraction to transplantation is crucial to ensure the function and survival of the graft. In recent years, maintaining organ viability has become more challenging because the shortage of donors has led to broader criteria for donor acceptability and consequently to organs with greater compromise. Organ damage occurs primarily as a result of ischemia-reperfusion injury, which is associated to additional damage from the preservation process. To minimize this damage, different techniques of organ preservation are used with the aim of optimizing organ function once perfusion is restored. Static cold storage is the most commonly used method of preservation because it is extremely simple, nearly universally available, and easy to transport. However, static cold storage may be unable to prevent the deterioration of the quality of organs from donors included under the broader criteria. In this article, we describe current preservation techniques; we place special emphasis on continuous machine perfusion.