Multi-Organ Exchange

[摘要] Kidney exchange, where candidates with organ failure trade incompatible but willing donors, is a life-saving alternative to the deceased donor waitlist, which has inadequate supply to meet demand.While fielded kidney exchanges see huge benefit from altruistic kidney donors (who give an organ without a paired needy candidate), a significantly higher medical risk to the donor deters similar altruism with livers.In this paper, we begin by exploring the idea of large-scale liver exchange, and show on demographically accurate data that vetted kidney exchange algorithms can be adapted to clear such an exchange at the nationwide level.We then propose cross-organ donation where kidneys and livers can be bartered for each other.We show theoretically that this multi-organ exchange provides linearly more transplants than running separate kidney and liver exchanges.This linear gain is a product of altruistic kidney donors creating chains that thread through the liver pool; it exists even when only a small but constant portion of the donors on the kidney side of the pool are willing to donate a liver lobe.We support this result experimentally on demographically accurate multi-organ exchanges.We conclude with thoughts regarding the fielding of a nationwide liver or joint liver-kidney exchange from a legal and computational point of view.

[学科分类] 人工智能