Towards an improved resolution of radiotherapy, scheduling

In any cancer treatment, waiting times are critical, the faster you treat, the more effective the treatment is. Minimizing waiting times is especially difficult in the context of radiotherapy where material and human resources are usually scarce. Although healthcare scheduling is extensively documented, few studies have addressed the specific radiotherapy problem. In this paper we develop an integer linear optimization of a non-block scheduling strategy to improve existing models accuracy. After analyzing the weakness of the previous works, we suggest a new mathematical model, which better fits the reality. First we increase the planning horizon to ensure efficiency over several weeks then we take into account several new constraints such as critical human resources and protocol-dependant constraints while using near real-life data from the studied hospital. Results achieved show an improvement of radiotherapy treatment room utilization, a higher number of patients treated along with a decrease in patient waiting times.