97. A Medical Samples Dispatching Problem
Contributed abstract in session TA-3: Healthcare Logistics /1, stream Regular talks.
Tuesday, 9:00-10:30Room: Room S2
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Jean-Charles Billaut
|
| University of Tours | |
| 2. | Hélène Blasco
|
| Université de Tours, INSERM | |
| 3. | Marina Vinot
|
| Université de Tours |
Abstract
For many rare diseases (e.g. amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), no diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers have been identified to help ensure good patient care and medical research in these areas is generally very active. For each disease, several centers treat cohorts of patients, with regular visits for clinical and biological explorations. In the field of health research, many research projects are based on the exploration of biological fluid samples and involve different hospital centers. The need to centralize samples in specialized laboratories responsible for specific biological analyzes is crucial. The Medical Samples Dispatching Problem is how to organize the flows to optimize the use of these precious samples.
We consider that several biological fluids (blood, cerebrospinal fluid, etc.) are collected from each patient of each cohort in several tubes of varying quantities. Each product must reach the other centers, which express needs for each product. Three constraints complicate this (sort of flow) problem: (1) dividing a sample into several portions is a tedious aliquoting operation, (2) a shipment requires a freeze/thaw operation, and (3) a patient sample cannot arrive in two different tubes on the same site. We minimize the maximum number of aliquoting operations and limit the number of freezing operations. We show that this problem is NP-complete, propose an MILP model, a lower bound and heuristic algorithms.
Keywords
- Healthcare logistics
- Decision support
- Optimization algorithms
Status: accepted
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