The development and evaluation of a fuzzy logic expert system for renal transplantation assignment: Is this a useful tool?

Allocating donor kidneys to patients is a complex, multicriteria decision-making problem which involves not only medical, but also ethical and political issues. In this paper, a fuzzy logic expert system approach was proposed as an innovative way to deal with the vagueness and complexity faced by medical doctors in kidney allocation decision making. A pilot fuzzy logic expert system for kidney allocation was developed and evaluated in comparison with two existing allocation algorithms: a priority sorting system used by multiple organ retrieval and exchange (MORE) in Canada and a point scoring systems used by united network for organ sharing (UNOS) in US. Our simulated experiment based on real data indicated that the fuzzy logic system can represent the expert's thinking well in handling complex tradeoffs, and overall, the fuzzy logic derived recommendations were more acceptable to the expert than those from the MORE and UNOS algorithms.