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.

MC-Tree: Dynamic Index Structure for Partially Clustered Multi-Dimensional Database

Index structure that enables efficient similarity queries in high-dimensional space is crucial for many applications. This paper discusses the indexing problem in dataset composed of partially clustered data, which exists in many applications. Current index methods are inefficient with partially clustered datasets. The dynamic and adaptive index structure presented here, called a multi-cluster tree (MC-tree), consists of a set of height-balanced trees for indexing. This index structure improves the querying efficiency in three ways: 1) Most bounding regions achieve uniform distributions, which results in fewer splits and less overlap compared with a single indexing tree. 2) The clusters in the dataset are dynamically detected when the index is updated. 3) The query process does not involve a sequential scan. The MC-tree was shown to be better than hierarchical and cluster-based indexes for the partially clustered datasets.