planCT : Chemotherapy scheduling system

Abstract

Chemotherapy is a well-established medical practice for treatment of various types of cancers. A chemotherapy programme is prepared by a specialist doctor. Preparation, scheduling and management of chemotherapy programmes, especially when many patients with competing requirements are involved, are complicated tasks. A chemotherapy programme involves a number of cycles, each cycle involving application of a number of cytotoxic agents to a patient intravenously over a specified length of time, e.g., 2 hours, on upto five consecutive days. Cycles are interleaved by intermission times during which patient's immune system is left to rest and recover. Intermission times are calculated based on clinical studies; chemotherapy agents and intermission times are selected by specialized doctors for individual patients to ensure maximum benefit to the patient being treated. Therefore, it is important that patient's chemotherapy plan is closely followed as prescribed by the expert. However, resource constraints on number of chemotherapy seats and health staff members available, conflicting schedules of many hundreds of patients and official holidays interfering with patients' schedules make it very difficult to plan for an optimal implementation of chemotherapy schedules as prepared by experts. In this article we examine issues involved in scheduling chemotherapy applications for multiple cancer patients under many constraints. We propose and simulate various approaches and calculate their performances.