João Pedro Pedroso, researcher at INESC TEC’s Centre for Industrial Engineering and Management (CEGI), presented the “27th Statistical Machine Learning Seminar”, on 3 December, at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, in Tokyo.

This opportunity was the result of a project led by INESC TEC, which was concluded in 2014 – KEP “New models for enhancing the kidney transplantation process”. The presence of the CEGI researcher in Tokyo is proof of INESC TEC’s relevant role in the study of paired kidney exchange.

Project KEP was the result of the identification of a problem which, according to João Pedro Pedroso, “affects a large number of people all over the world – kidney failure. The most common course of treatment is dialysis, but the alternative, kidney transplant, significantly improves the quality of life of patients. When the patient and the donor are physiologically incompatible, the patient-donor pair can join another set of pairs in the same situation in order to find possible matches. That leads to an optimisation problem: which pairs should be selected so that it is possible to perform the largest number of transplants possible?”

One of the aspects analysed in KEP was the maximisation of hope (mathematically speaking) for the number of transplants. The gaps and obstacles found in this study, such as the mathematical modelling difficulties or effective mathematical methods, have led to the choice of this theme as the research topic in December 2015 at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, in Tokyo.

“The Institute of Statistical Mathematics is a Japanese research institute  and a unique pillar of research in the country, focusing on the application of statistics and data science”, concludes João Pedro Pedroso.

The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with FCUP.

INESC TEC, December 2015