SummerSim 2016: The Kidney Transplant Process Model (KTPM): Simulation Tool for the Transplant Process - Response for Reviewers

[Jacob Barhak]

Below s the Response for reviewers submitted as part of the camera ready manuscript

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Review 1: Ed Kaxmierczak
Thank you very much for your feedback on my work, I greatly appreciate your comments and suggestions. In response to your comments on motivation, I completely agree with all of the benefits mentioned and added a paragraph at the end of the introduction on the motivation behind the research.  The aspect of incorporating different time scales into the model is interesting and I would like to look into this in future work, over the course of the rest of my PhD.  The costs are an additional factor and I will work on expanding the model in the future to quantify the costs of keeping people on dialysis for a longer time.

It seems as if the rest of your review was cut off.  Thank you again for your consideration.

Review 2: Jacob Barhak
Thank you for your feedback on my research and for all of your suggestions and comments.  I appreciate that you recognize the importance of this field of research and I hope to continue working in this context.

I have made the occurrences of deceased donor and living donor consistent and uncapitalized along with the other minor changes regarding clarification and capitalization.

In regards to your comments on Figure 2, I do not entirely understand: "and the crooks hairs are on 0.5".  The deceased factor ranges from 0 to 1 and does not go up to 2 because more than doubling the number of deceased donors in the United States is highly unlikley, there simply are not enough people that pass away under reasonable, healthy circumstances to become and organ donor.  Explanation to this point has been added in the Initialization section.

For Experiment II, the probability of receiving an living donor organ was increased so the number of living donors increased while the number of deceased donors remained the same.

Thank you again for your reviews and your support. 

Review 3: Stefan Scholz
Thank you for taking the time to review my research, I have attempted to address all of your concerns in the latest version of my paper.   I added some more information on the waiting list process to the Introduction section.  I am not sure what you mean by justification for the time frame, but I did add in a sentence on the shortage of donor organs which requires a long waiting time.  Omitted information is briefly mentioned now in the discussion section.

I have made all of the minor edits with regards to checking sources, table references, and grammatical errors.  I also appreciate your suggestions for expanded and future work.  I have a giant list of these things that I would like to try out and explore further, I hope to use the rest of my PhD program to continue answering these questions.  Another reviewer also mentioned the financial impacts of the changes to the waiting list, I will definitely begin investigating this as well.