General Meeting: Dr. Russ Greiner on Survival Prediction and Liver Transplant Waitlists

Deciding which patient should be waitlisted for a liver transplant should depend on "utility" -- the patient's chance of long-term survival with the graft.  However, most survival models use only "risk scores", which are "discriminative" (can compare predicted outcomes between patients) but are not measuring the desired characteristic: utility for a single patient.  This motivated us to develop and use a novel type of predictor, which can produce an "Individual Survival Distribution" for each patient. This presentation first overviews standard survival analysis models to discuss what each can (and cannot) do, to motivate our approach.  We then discuss the issue of evaluating these models, leading to a novel evaluation method (D-calibration).  Finally, we show that this approach works effectively, leading to a deployed system to help hepatologists make this critical decision for their patients.