Abstract
In kidney exchange programmes patients with end-stage renal failure may exchange their willing, but incompatible living donors among each other. National kidney exchange programmes are in operation in ten European countries, and some of them have already conducted international exchanges through regulated collaborations. The exchanges are selected by conducting regular matching runs (typically every three months) according to well-defined constraints and optimisation criteria, which may differ across countries. In this work we give integer programming formulations for solving international kidney exchange problems, where the optimisation goals and constraints may be different in the participating countries and various feasibility criteria may apply for the international cycles and chains. We also conduct simulations showing the long-run effects of international collaborations for different pools and under various national restrictions and objectives. We compute the expected gains of the cooperation between two countries with different pool sizes and different restrictions on the cycle-length. For instance, if country A allows 3-way cycles and country B allows 2-way cycles only, whilst the pool size of country A is four times larger than the pool size of country B (which is a realistic case for the relation of Spain and France, respectively), then the increase in the number of transplants will be about 2% for country A and about 37% for country B.
Highlights
When an end-stage kidney patient has a willing, but incompatible living donor, in many countries this patient can exchange his/her donor for a compatible one in a so-called kidney exchange programme (KEP)
The so-called virtual compatibility graph represents the patient-donor pairs with nodes and an arc represents a possible donation between the corresponding donor and patient, that is found compatible in a virtual crossmatch test
We formulate novel IP models for dealing with potentially diverse constraints and goals in international kidney exchange programmes and we test two-country cooperation scenarios under different assumptions over their constraints, the possibility of having chains triggered by altruistic donors, and the sizes of their pools
Summary
When an end-stage kidney patient has a willing, but incompatible living donor, in many countries this patient can exchange his/her donor for a compatible one in a so-called kidney exchange programme (KEP). In the Scandinavian programme and in the Prague-Wien collaboration, the protocol is to find an overall optimum for the joint pool In the latter situation, the fairness of the solution for the countries involved can be seen as an important requirement, which was studied in [13] with extensive long-term simulations by proposing the usage of a compensation scheme among the countries. We formulate novel IP models for dealing with potentially diverse constraints and goals in international kidney exchange programmes and we test two-country cooperation scenarios under different assumptions over their constraints, the possibility of having chains triggered by altruistic donors, and the sizes of their pools
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
