A Study of Kidney Exchange Problem and its Recent Challenges

Abstract

A person whose both kidneys have been damaged can hardly survive. One early idea in this situation is to have kidneys from a deceased person. Further medical probe reveals that one healthy person whose two kidneys are functioning well can survive with only one kidney and thereby the fact is that the person who is healthy can donate one of the kidneys. This creates an interesting market with living donors and is very popular in many countries. However, a living donor can’t exchange his/her kidneys with the patient whose two kidneys have been damaged because of the medical issues. But, this type of donor may have a match with some other patient and this patient’s living donor can have a match with the former one. This situation can be modeled with house allocation problem where someone having a house(donor) has some other house as his/her preference (other donor) and vice versa. In this paper, a study is carried out in this direction and simultaneous kidney transplantation issue is simulated with largescale implementation. A current research challenge of the kidney exchange problem, namely the incentive issues of the hospitals, is explored next and a budget feasible mechanism is proposed.