Living Kidney Donation: Addressing the Supply Shortage

Kidney transplantation is considered the gold standard for end-stage renal kidney disease, but there are not enough donors to meet the need. In this talk we will discuss kidney donation from living donors (Living Kidney donation) which constitutes one third of the overall kidney transplants in the U.S. We will present our multi-disciplinary efforts to address two important challenges that could help reducing the shortage: 1) Improving the matching between available donors and patients in a Kidney Exchange Program: Kidney exchange programs allow incompatible donor-patients pairs to switch donors. Selecting the most beneficial set of transplants is crucial and several programs rely on the solution of optimization problems to fulfill this task. Taking into account failures and cancellations is particularly valuable while planning transplants: if some of the arranged exchanges can no longer take place, the solution may still be rearranged, minimizing the emotional impact on patients. We propose a method to generate reconfigurable exchanges to account for unexpected failures. 2) Finding the generous people who might be willing to donate: A large population of people discuss their thoughts and experiences with living donation on the internet. Taking Reddit forum as an example, we analyze Reddit posts related to living kidney donation and propose a prompt engineering method to generate an optimal prompt to categorize personal experiences of Reddit users into Present, Past, and Other based on their content.

Dr. Monica Gentili is an Associate Professor in the Industrial Engineering Department and Co-director of the Logistics and Distribution Institute at the University of Louisville. Dr. Gentili’s research focuses on applied optimization and data analytics for transportation, humanitarian logistics and healthcare applications. She has received fundings from NSF, private industry, and the Italian Ministry of Research and Education. She has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed journal publications, serves as the Associated Editor for the Optimization Letters journal and Area Editor for the Soft Computing journal.