Authors
Oguzhan Alagoz, Lisa M Maillart, Andrew J Schaefer, Mark S Roberts
Publication date
2007/2
Journal
Operations Research
Volume
55
Issue
1
Pages
24-36
Publisher
INFORMS
Description
The only available therapy for patients with end-stage liver disease is organ transplantation. In the United States, patients with end-stage liver disease are placed on a waiting list and offered livers based on location and waiting time, as well as current and past health. Although there is a shortage of cadaveric livers, 45% of all cadaveric liver offers are declined by the first transplant surgeon and/or patient to whom they are offered. We consider the decision problem faced by these patients: Should an offered organ of a given quality be accepted or declined? We formulate a Markov decision process model in which the state of the process is described by patient state and organ quality. We use a detailed model of patient health to estimate the parameters of our decision model and implicitly consider the effects of the waiting list through our patient-state-dependent definition of the organ arrival probabilities. We derive …
Total citations
Scholar articles
O Alagoz, LM Maillart, AJ Schaefer, MS Roberts - Operations Research, 2007