Kidney Paired Donation

The first nationwide kidney paired donation, or KPD, took place about a week ago. This program uses an algorithm developed by my advisor, Tuomas Sandholm, and Avrim Blum (and edited by me!) at Carnegie Mellon University.

The initial run of the computer matching process included just 43 kidney transplant candidates and 45 potential living donors. The national KPD pool will eventually include as many as 10,000 donor-recipient pairs. Each pair includes a potential donor who is not medically compatible with his or her original intended recipient, or is less than an optimal match. The algorithm then checks for new combinations between the pairs based on compatible blood and tissue types, solving this problem optimally.

With nearly 87,000 people on the national kidney waiting list, hopefully this algorithm--in conjunction with the 77 participating hospitals across the country--will make a dent in this number.

November Coverage
CMU Press Release
CMU Homepage Coverage
International Business Times
Medindia
Medical News Today
...and others...

October Coverage
US Dept. of Health and Human Services
United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS)
University of Colorado

Cooking for Geeks

Jeff Potter from Cooking for Geeks (link) visited Carnegie Mellon yesterday as part of a tour to promote his new book. Aside from an excellent talk covering some neat topics about cooking/baking (e.g., using a 48-hour warm water bath to cook meatloaf), the audience was witness to ice cream made using liquid nitrogen.

With a boiling point of roughly -195.8 Celsius, liquid nitrogen provides a significantly faster, albeit a little dangerous, way to make ice cream. On top of this, both the cream and water in the ice cream-to-be freeze significantly faster than normal, creating smaller crystalline structures and a smoother texture overall. Pretty cool.



Here is a short video of the ice cream demonstration (liquid nitrogen use begins at 2:45). Here's a link to his book.