The Optimal Timing of Living-Donor Liver Transplantation
用马尔可夫决策过程模型研究活体肝移植的最佳时机，以最大化患者质量调整预期寿命，并用临床数据验证了控制限策略的有效性。
Living donors are a significant and increasing source of livers for transplantation, mainly because of the insufficient supply of cadaveric organs. We consider the problem of optimally timing a living-donor liver transplant to maximize the patient's total reward, such as quality-adjusted life expectancy. We formulate a Markov decision process (MDP) model in which the state of the process is described by patient health. We derive structural properties of the MDP model, including a set of intuitive conditions that ensure the existence of a control-limit optimal policy. We use clinical data in our computational experiments, which show that the optimal policy is typically of control-limit type.