Li Y, Song PXK, Leichtman AB, Rees MA, Kalbfleisch JD. Decision Making in Kidney Paired Donation Programs with Altruistic Donors.
Sort (Barc) 2014;
38:53-72. [PMID:
25309603 PMCID:
PMC4193813]
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Abstract
In recent years, kidney paired donation (KPD) has been extended to include living non-directed or altruistic donors, in which an altruistic donor donates to the candidate of an incompatible donor-candidate pair with the understanding that the donor in that pair will further donate to the candidate of a second pair, and so on; such a process continues and thus forms an altruistic donor-initiated chain. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to sequentially allocate the altruistic donor (or bridge donor) so as to maximize the expected utility; analogous to the way a computer plays chess, the idea is to evaluate different allocations for each altruistic donor (or bridge donor) by looking several moves ahead in a derived look-ahead search tree. Simulation studies are provided to illustrate and evaluate our proposed method.
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