Data Matching

The ZKRD has deve­lo­ped a soft­ware appli­ca­ti­on cal­led Opti­Match® for this very pur­po­se. Opti­Match® sear­ches the data­ba­ses and gene­ra­tes a list of poten­ti­al, sui­ta­ble donors, known as matches, for the respec­ti­ve pati­ent. In addi­ti­on to the HLA cha­rac­te­ristics, this list con­ta­ins fur­ther secon­da­ry sel­ec­tion cri­te­ria such as the age and sex of the donor. The match list for all pati­ents is updated every night. If the search cen­ter and doc­tors agree on a donor, the donor’s respec­ti­ve donor cen­ter will be noti­fied by the ZKRD. The donor cen­ter will then cont­act the donor.

Pro­ba­bi­li­ty cal­cu­la­ti­on with OptiMatch®

Using com­plex cal­cu­la­ti­ons, the soft­ware deter­mi­nes the pro­ba­bi­li­ty of a match bet­ween the poten­ti­al donor and a spe­ci­fic pati­ent. They should have a total of 9 out of 10 – ide­al­ly all 10 – HLA cha­rac­te­ristics in com­mon. Espe­ci­al­ly whe­re donor typ­ing is less accu­ra­te due to being incom­ple­te or having been per­for­med with out­da­ted methods, com­plex cal­cu­la­ti­ons are requi­red to iden­ti­fy the miss­ing data.

If a pati­ent has very spe­ci­fic tis­sue types for which a gene­tic twin is high­ly unli­kely to be found, the soft­ware can fil­ter out the donors with the least tis­sue dif­fe­ren­ces. Users can use num­e­rous con­trol para­me­ters to cus­to­mi­ze Opti­Match® to the requi­re­ments of indi­vi­du­al pati­ents. As a mile­stone in modern bio­sta­tis­tics and popu­la­ti­on gene­tics, it sup­ports doc­tors and trans­plant cen­ters in making dif­fi­cult decis­i­ons, impro­ves the cost-effec­ti­ve­ness of the pro­cess, and ulti­m­ate­ly saves pati­ents valuable time.