Computerized decision support system for kidney paired donation program.

In order to assist physicians and other health professionals for health care improvement, clinical decision support systems, through interactive computerized software, become very popular in clinical practice. The crisis associated with kidney organ shortage has triggered an innovative strategy, termed as Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) program, to address a rapidly expanding demand for donor kidneys. KPD program involves how to making optimal decision for allowing patients with incompatible living donors to receive compatible organs by best matching donors. Although some computerized optimization tools are being used in the current KPD program, there still lacks a general decision support system which enables us to evaluate and compare different kidney allocation strategies and effects of policy. In this paper, we discuss a general computer-based KPD decision model that appropriately reflects the real world clinical application. Also, the whole decision process is to be visualized by our Graphical User Interface (GUI) software, which offers a user friendly platform not only to provide a convenient interface for clinicians but also to assess different kidney exchange strategies of clinical importance.