Biostatistics Seminar: "Match making in a Kidney Paired Donation Program"
Jack Kalbfleisch, PhD
Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Match making in a Kidney Paired Donation Program
ALL ARE WELCOME
Abstract:
A kidney-paired donation (KPD) pool consists of transplant candidates and their incompatible donors, along with non-directed donors (NDDs). A computer algorithm makes use of information on blood type of candidates and donors as well as donor HLA antigens and candidate sensitivities to predict possible matches.听 In a match run, exchanges are arranged among pairs in the pool via cycles, as well as chains created from NDDs. A problem of importance is how to arrange cycles and chains to optimize the number of transplants. I will discuss various schemes for carrying out match runs and compare them in examples and in simulations.听 Our proposed approach takes account of probabilities that chosen transplants may not be completed as well as allowing for contingencies when proposed transplants turn out not to be viable. We propose an approach based on selection of locally relevant subsets with respect to cycles and chains of a given size. Simulations are considered that utilize data on candidate/donor pairs and NDDs from the Alliance for Paired Donation. Incorporating uncertainties and fallbacks into the selection process yields substantially more transplants on average, increasing the number of transplants by as much as 40% compared to a standard selection scheme.
Bio:
Dr. Kalbfleisch is a professor of biostatistics and statistics at the University of Michigan. He served as chair of the Department of Biostatistics from 2002 to 2007 and as Director of the Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center from 2008 to 2011. He received his Ph.D. in statistics in 1969 from the University of Waterloo. He was an assistant professor of statistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1970-73) and on faculty at the University of Waterloo (1973-2002). At Waterloo, he served as chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science (1984-1990) and as dean of the faculty of Mathematics (1990-1998). He has held visiting appointments as Professor at the University of Washington, the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Auckland, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the National University of Singapore. He has interests in and has publised in various areas of statistics and biostatistics including life history and survival analysis, likelihood methods of inference, bootstrapping and estimating equations, mixture and mixed effects models and medical applications, particularly in the area of renal disease and organ transplantation. Dr. Kalbfleisch is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Gold Medalist of the Statistical Society of Canada. He also received the Distinguished Research Award from the UM School of Public Health in 2011.
听