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Polici's avatar

The problem goes beyond solving the issue with technology

Take a look at this https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/477710-its-time-to-provide-needed-reform-to-the-organ-donation-system/

Of course, you can't solve lack of Congressional action with AI algorithms while tens of thousands of organs just get lost or go bad. The algorithm isn't going to take an organ and put it back in the jar if someone's spilled it

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Ben Recht's avatar

This post is very over the top, but the reality of transplantation is far more nuanced.

You are attributing one protected group being harmed without trying to get at the causal factor for why there is a disparity. The cancer/age issue is tricky. In this response to the initial critique of the score, Raj et al. point out that young people with cancer have more stable livers and don’t fare well after early liver transplantation because of cancer recurrence:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)01308-9/fulltext

Raj et al. also highlight that the new score reduced mortality on liver transplant waitlists. Medical decision-making is always multiobjective.

The TBS critics also propose not throwing away risk scores but using a different risk score, MELD. Qu and Schmelzle point out that MELD has its own issues concerning cancer patients:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)01309-0/fulltext

The problem of prioritizing liver transplantation is a wicked problem. In a resource-constrained system, some sort of rules of prioritization are inevitable. It’s worth emphasizing that the old rule for transplantation was also a statistical rule! You seem to be complaining about the new rule solely because it has more variables.

Or perhaps you are arguing here that all rules are bad. That’s fine, but that’s a call for anarchism, not an indictment of AI.

And I’d urge you all to consider that calling Cox proportional hazard regression “AI” is itself a kind of snake oil.

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