Who will be blinded {17a}
EVENT, BLIND
Owing to the nature of the surgical procedure, it is not possible to blind the surgical and the anesthesiologist team for the group allocation. Because the patient cannot impact on the study outcomes after liver transplantation, there is no need to blind the patient. HOPExt is thus an open-label trial. However, in the event of isolated ALT or AST missing data for the primary endpoint, these data will be replaced by imputation on a case-by-case basis. The imputation will be performed blindly by the methodologist together with the principal investigator and will be validated by the DSMB. See the 