Personalized donor-recipient matching for organ transplantation

Organ transplants can improve the life expectancy and quality of life for the recipient but carry the risk of serious postoperative complications, such as septic shock and organ rejection. The probability of a successful transplant depends in a very subtle fashion on compatibility between the donor and the recipient - but current medical practice is short of domain knowledge regarding the complex nature of recipient-donor compatibility. Hence a data-driven approach for learning compatibility has the potential for significant improvements in match quality. This paper proposes a novel system (ConfidentMatch) that is trained using data from electronic health records. ConfidentMatch predicts the success of an organ transplant (in terms of the 3-year survival rates) on the basis of clinical and demographic traits of the donor and recipient. ConfidentMatch captures the heterogeneity of the donor and recipient traits by optimally dividing the feature space into clusters and constructing different optimal predictive models to each cluster. The system controls the complexity of the learned predictive model in a way that allows for assuring more granular and accurate predictions for a larger number of potential recipient-donor pairs, thereby ensuring that predictions are "personalized" and tailored to individual characteristics to the finest possible granularity. Experiments conducted on the UNOS heart transplant dataset show the superiority of the prognostic value of ConfidentMatch to other competing benchmarks; ConfidentMatch can provide predictions of success with 95% accuracy for 5,489 patients of a total population of 9,620 patients, which corresponds to 410 more patients than the most competitive benchmark algorithm (DeepBoost).