Open Access

ARTICLE

An Optimized Framework for Surgical Team Selection

Hemant Petwal^*, Rinkle Rani

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala, 147004, India

* Corresponding Author: Hemant Petwal. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Intelligent Decision Support Systems for Complex Healthcare Applications)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 69(2), 2563-2582. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.017548

Received 02 February 2021; Accepted 11 April 2021; Issue published 21 July 2021

Abstract

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.

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