Radiotherapy treatment scheduling: Implementing operations research into clinical practice.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Every week, radiotherapy centers face the complex task of scheduling hundreds of treatment sessions amongst the available linear accelerators. With the increase in cancer patient numbers, manually creating a feasible and efficient schedule has shown to be a difficult, time-consuming task. Although operations research models have been increasingly reported upon to optimize patient care logistics, there is almost no scientific evidence of implementation in practice.

Methods

A mathematical operations research model was adapted to generate radiotherapy treatment schedules in two Dutch centers. The model was iteratively adjusted to fulfill the technical and medical constraints of each center until a valid model was attained. Patient data was collected for the planning

SUBMITTER: Vieira B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7894882 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature