Logic-based Approach and Visualization for the Nuclear Medicine Rescheduling Problem

The Nuclear Medicine Scheduling problem consists of assigning patients to a day, on which the patient will undergo the medical check, the preparation, and the actual image detection process. The schedule of the patients should consider their different requirements and the available resources, e.g., varying time required for different diseases and radiopharmaceuticals used, number of injection chairs, and tomographs available. Recently, this problem has been solved using a logic-based approach using the Answer Set Programming (ASP) methodology. However, it may be the case that a computed schedule can not be implemented due to a sudden emergency and/or unavailability of resources, thus rescheduling is needed. In this paper, we present an ASP-based approach to solve such a situation, which we call the Nuclear Medicine Rescheduling problem. Experiments on three scenarios in which rescheduling may be needed, and employing real data from a medium size hospital in Italy, show that our rescheduling solution provides satisfying results even when the concurrent number of emergencies and unavailability is significant. We finally present the design and implementation of a web application for the easy usage of our solutions.