@Article{cmc.2021.017548, AUTHOR = {Hemant Petwal, Rinkle Rani}, TITLE = {An Optimized Framework for Surgical Team Selection}, JOURNAL = {Computers, Materials \& Continua}, VOLUME = {69}, YEAR = {2021}, NUMBER = {2}, PAGES = {2563--2582}, URL = {http://www.techscience.com/cmc/v69n2/43864}, ISSN = {1546-2226}, 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.}, DOI = {10.32604/cmc.2021.017548} }