Dynamic Kidney Exchange

Timing Objectives in Dynamic Kidney Exchange

Balancing Efficiency and Fairness in Dynamic Kidney Exchange

The preferred treatment for kidney failure is a transplant; however, demand for donor kidneys far outstrips supply. Kidney exchange, an innovation where willing but incompatible donor-patient pairs can exchange organs—via cycles and altruist-initiated chains— provides a life-saving alternative to long waiting lists for deceased-donor organs. Typically, fielded exchanges act myopically, consider...

Robust dynamic optimization with application to kidney exchange

Kidney exchange provides a life-saving alternative to long waiting lists for patients in need of a new kidney. We derive a variety of mathematical models for the kidney exchange optimization problem, where the general goal is to maximize some form of social welfare vis-à-vis transplanting kidneys. We explore the implications of making the optimization problem dynamic (considering the future evo...

Dynamic Matching via Weighted Myopia with Application to Kidney Exchange

In many dynamic matching applications—especially high-stakes ones—the competitive ratios of prior-free online algorithms are unacceptably poor. The algorithm should take distributional information about possible futures into account in deciding what action to take now. This is typically done by drawing sample trajectories of possible futures at each time period, but may require a prohibitively ...

Kidney Exchange

Most transplanted kidneys are from cadavers, but there are also substantial numbers of transplants from live donors. Recently, there have started to be kidney exchanges involving two donor-patient pairs such that each donor cannot give a kidney to the intended recipient because of immunological incompatibility, but each patient can receive a kidney from the other donor. Exchanges are also made ...