Reducing Patient Waiting Time for Radiotherapy Treatments with a Genetic Algorithm

摘要

Health care systems have been challenged in recent years to deliver high quality care. One of the reasons is due to limited resources. How to efficiently utilize limited resources has been and still is a research problem. A particular case is radiotherapy patient scheduling in oncology departments. The As Soon As Possible (ASAP) and Just-in-time (JIT) algorithms are commonly used scheduling approaches. However, with these approaches, it is not difficult to see that a long treatment process with an early release time will occupy most of early available time slots and thus cause short treatment processes with slightly late release times being blocked. In this paper, we apply a genetic algorithm to optimize the patient scheduling orders and explore if the patients total waiting time can be reduced. Our experimental studies indicate that using a genetic algorithm to determine a scheduling order can reduce patient total waiting time.