The nuclear medicine production and delivery problem Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Half-life is a unique characteristic of radioactive substances used in a variety of medical treatments. Radioisotope F-18 used for diagnosing and monitoring many types of cancers has a half-life of 110 minutes. As such, it requires careful coordination of production and delivery by manufacturers and medical end-users. To model this critical production and delivery problem, we develop a mixed integer program and propose a variant of a large neighborhood search algorithm with various improvement algorithms. We conduct several computational experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The method when applied in a case study shows that improvement in terms of both time and cost is possible in the production and delivery of F-18. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

author list (cited authors)

  • Lee, J., Kim, B., Johnson, A. L., & Lee, K.

citation count

  • 29

complete list of authors

  • Lee, Jongsung||Kim, Byung-In||Johnson, Andrew L||Lee, Kiho

publication date

  • July 2014