An Optimized Framework for Surgical Team Selection

In the healthcare system,a surgical team is a unit of experienced personnel who provide medical care to surgical patients during surgery.Selecting a surgical team is challenging for a multispecialty hospital as the performance of its members affects the efficiency and reliability of the hospital’s patient care.The effectiveness of a surgical team depends not only on its individual members but also on the coordination among them.In this paper,we addressed the challenges of surgical team selection faced by a multispecialty hospital and proposed a decision-making framework for selecting the optimal list of surgical teams for a given patient.The proposed framework focused on improving the existing surgical history management system by arranging surgery-bound patients into optimal subgroups based on similar characteristics and selecting an optimal list of surgical teams for a new surgical patient based on the patient’s subgroups.For this end,two population-based meta-heuristic algorithms for clustering of mixed datasets and multi-objective optimization were proposed.The proposed algorithms were tested using different datasets and benchmark functions.Furthermore,the proposed framework was validated through a case study of a real postoperative surgical dataset obtained from the orthopedic surgery department of a multispecialty hospital in India.The results revealed that the proposed framework was efficient in arranging patients in optimal groups as well as selecting optimal surgical teams for a given patient.

An intuitive general rank-based correlation coefficient

Correlation analysis is an effective mechanism for studying patterns in data and making predictions.Many interesting discoveries have been made by formulating correlations in seemingly unrelated data. We propose an algorithm to quantify the theory of correlations and to give an intuitive, more accurate correlation coefficient.We propose a predictive metric to calculate correlations between paired values, known as the general rank-based correlation coefficient. It fulfills the five basic criteria of a predictive metric： independence from sample size,value between-1 and 1, measuring the degree of monotonicity, insensitivity to outliers, and intuitive demonstration.Furthermore, the metric has been validated by performing experiments using a real-time dataset and random number simulations. Mathematical derivations of the proposed equations have also been provided. We have compared it to Spearman＇s rank correlation coefficient. The comparison results show that the proposed metric fares better than the existing metric on all the predictive metric criteria.