Novel Approaches to Radiotherapy Planning and Scheduling in the NHS
Lead Research Organisation:
Coventry University
Department Name: Mathematical and Information Sciences
Abstract
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Publications
Kapamara Truword
(2010)
Novel approaches to radiotherapy planning and scheduling in the NHS
Kapamara, T
(2009)
A Heuristics and Steepest Hill Climbing Method to Scheduling Radiotherapy Patients,
in Proceedings (on CD)
Kapamara, T
(2006)
A Review of Scheduling Problems in Radiotherapy
in Proceedings, ISBN 1-84600-013-0
Kapamara, T
(2007)
A simulation of a radiotherapy treatment system: A case study of a local cancer centre
in Proceedings
Petrovic D
(2011)
Multi-objective genetic algorithms for scheduling of radiotherapy treatments for categorised cancer patients
in Expert Systems with Applications
Petrovic D
(2009)
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
| Description | Different approaches to scheduling of radiotherapy pretreatment and treatment appointments were developed considering various medical and scheduling constraints and different objectives, such as minimisation of number of patients who do not meet their waiting time targets, minimisation of usage of overtime slots, minimisation of machines idle time, and so on. Motivated by heuristics developed for production scheduling problems, novel heuristics-based methods were developed for four unites that comprised the whole radiotherapy process. Another approach was based on genetic algorithms (GAs) which optimised the whole radiotherapy process . Different experiments were carried out to analyse the performance of the two radiotherapy scheduling approaches. It was shown that both approaches created schedules of good performance with respect to waiting times and percentages of late patients of different categories. |
| Exploitation Route | Radiotherapy scheduling problems can be adapted and modified for other problems of patient scheduling, in particular those where meeting the waiting time targets is of interest. Further on, the developed models and approaches can be applied to a variety of scheduling problems which are characterised by the presence of multiple resource types, dynamic arrivals of tasks/activities/jobs to be scheduled, different importance of tasks/activities/jobs, various types of uncertainties that are inherent in real-world scheduling and multiple criteria to measure the quality of schedules. |
| Sectors | Healthcare,Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology |
| Description | The hospitals expressed a high level of interest in the results achieved throughout the project. They were provided with a prototype software package for radiotherapy scheduling. |
| Description | Nottingham City Hospital |
| Organisation | Nottingham City Hospital |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Hospitals |
| Start Year | 2006 |
| Description | Walsgrave General Hospital |
| Organisation | University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust |
| Department | Walsgrave General Hospital |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Hospitals |
| PI Contribution | Development of new scheduling models and of prototype decision support systems for scheduling of radiotherapy patients. A successful outcome of the research can potentially lead to (a) an increased ability to respond to greater complexities of treatments within the operational resource constraints and thereby improving the quality of treatments, (b) increased patient throughput, reducing waiting time and waiting lists for treatments, (c) smoother operation of radiotherapy clinics, thus reducing stress levels in patients and improving consistency in terms of dose delivery, and (d) most of all, a potential increase in the survival rate of cancer patients by reducing the waiting time for radiotherapy treatments. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Radiologists in the Arden cancer Centre in the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust provided us with their expertise in patients scheduling and patient data which were used in our developed prototype systems for scheduling of radiotherapy patients. |
| Impact | Outputs of this research include a number of novel radiotherapy patients scheduling optimisation models disseminated to medical, operational research and computer science audience. They are published in 1 international peer reviewed journals, 2 reviewed chapters in edited books and 9 papers in proceedings of international conferences. Two prototype decision support systems for scheduling of radiotherapy patients are developed. |
| Start Year | 2006 |