The OPTN Kidney committee is evaluating a variety of different approaches to kidney allocation. The medical outcome of expected patient survival, both with and without a transplant, is of key importance in the evaluation of these approaches. These two expected lifetimes are used to compute the Life Years From Transplant, or LYFT, which is the estimated number of additional life years that a specific kidney (or kidney-pancreas) would give a candidate. The following papers document the analytical methods and theoretical support for the calculation of lifetimes with and without transplant and of LYFT, along with the role of LYFT in allocation systems. All of these papers are draft working papers of the SRTR and several are actively being revised, as methods are refined to address new issues.

• Calculating Life Years From Transplant (LYFT): Methods for Kidney and Kidney-Pancreas Candidates
  
  
• Predicting the Life Years From Transplant (LYFT): Choosing a Metric
  
  
• Extrapolation Methods: Approximating the Median Survival Time Beyond the Duration of Follow-Up Based on Geometric and Linear Growth in Death Rates
  
  
• Avoiding Statistical Bias in Predicting the Life Years From Transplant (LYFT)
  
  
• Methods for Discounting Median Lifetimes
  
  
• Transplant Allocation to Optimize Total Lifetime

The Kidney-Pancreas Simulated Allocation Model (KPSAM) User Guide can be found here.