SAN DIEGO, June 13 A computerized method for matching living kidney donors with kidney disease patients may increase the number of kidney transplants, say U.S. researchers.Kidney exchanges are now considered the best chance for boosting the number of kidney transplants in the United States. More than 70,000 Americans are on the waiting list for kidney transplants and about 4,000 die waiting each year, according to the Alliance for Paired Donation, a kidney exchange program.The matching algorithm developed by Carnegie Mellon University makes it possible to create matches for three- and four-way exchanges -- that is, three or four donors matched to three or four recipients -- as well as two-way exchanges. In other words, the computer model finds potential matches among a national pool of donors and recipients.For example, last month the algorithm identified four potential two-way exchanges, three three-way exchanges and one four-way exchange among about 100 donor-patient pairs and seven altruistic donors, while the old matching method identified only one two-way exchange, according to Tuomas Sandholm, of the Carnegie Mellon University.The findings are scheduled to be presented Friday at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Electronic Commerce in San Diego.Copyright 2007 by UPI
