Stateless Two-Stage Multiple Criteria Scheduling in Nuclear Medicine

Examination in nuclear medicine exhibits scheduling difficulties due to its intricate clinical issues, such as varied radiopharmaceuticals for different diseases, machine preparation and length of scan, and patients’ and hospital’s criteria and/or limitations. Many scheduling methods exist but are limited for nuclear medicine. In this paper, we present stateless two-stage scheduling to cope with multiple criteria decision making. The first stage mostly deals with patients’ conditions. The second stage concerns more the clinical condition and its correlations with patients’ preference which presents more complicated intertwined configurations. A greedy algorithm is proposed in the second stage to determine the (time slot and patient) pair in linear time. The result shows practical and efficient scheduling for nuclear medicine.

[1]  Ola Jabali,et al.  Staggered work shifts: a way to downsize and restructure an emergency department workforce yet maintain current operational performance , 2007, Health care management science.

[2]  Lewis Ntaimo,et al.  Stochastic online appointment scheduling of multi-step sequential procedures in nuclear medicine , 2013, Health care management science.

[3]  C.-T. Chang.  Binary Behavior of Fuzzy Programming With Piecewise Linear Membership Functions , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

[4]  M. Carter,et al.  Scheduling Emergency Room Physicians , 2001, Health care management science.

[5]  Brian T. Denton,et al.  Dynamic Appointment Scheduling of a Stochastic Server with Uncertain Demand , 2013, INFORMS J. Comput..

[6]  Ching-Chin Chern,et al.  A heuristic algorithm for the hospital health examination scheduling problem , 2008, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[7]  Ching-Ter Chang.  An Approximation Approach for Representing S-Shaped Membership Functions , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

[8]  George M. Segall,et al.  Status of and Trends in Nuclear Medicine in the United States , 2011, The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

[9]  Bharat Bhasker,et al.  Product classification in the Internet business - a fuzzy approach , 2005, Decis. Support Syst..

[10]  Diwakar Gupta,et al.  Appointment scheduling in health care: Challenges and opportunities , 2008 .

[11]  C-T Chang.  On product classification with various membership functions and binary behaviour , 2014, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[12]  Peter A. N. Bosman,et al.  Optimization of Online Patient Scheduling with Urgencies and Preferences , 2009, AIME.

[13]  Sander M. Bohte,et al.  Adaptive Optimization of Hospital Resource Calendars , 2007, AIME.

[14]  Sander M. Bohte,et al.  Adaptive resource allocation for efficient patient scheduling , 2009, Artif. Intell. Medicine.

[15]  Ching-Ter Chang,et al.  Multi-choice goal programming , 2007 .

[16]  P. Sánchez,et al.  A SIMULATION-ILP BASED TOOL FOR SCHEDULING ER STAFF , 2003 .

[17]  Zrinka Lukac,et al.  Use of VNS heuristics for scheduling of patients in hospital , 2011, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[18]  Sakesun Suthummanon,et al.  Applying activity-based costing to the nuclear medicine unit , 2005, Health services management research.

[19]  Jan M. H. Vissers,et al.  Patient flow-based allocation of inpatient resources: A case study , 1998, Eur. J. Oper. Res..