Efficiency of an RFID Positioning System for Cancer Patients in a Heavy Ion Center

概要

1) Background and Objective of Research
Heavy Ion therapy is relatively newer and more effective treatment modality of radiatio n therapy in cancer. Due to its high infrastructural cost, this facility is sparsely av ailable (12 centers as of April 2020) across the globe. Most effective utilization of t hese centers is a must to provide maximum benefit to the society as well as generating more revenue. Long waiting time of patients due to various reasons reduces the efficien cy of a treatment center and overall satisfaction of patients. By using Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) technology, we performed tracking of medical staff and pa tients treated at Gunma University Heavy Ion Medical Center (GHMC) and analyzed their s tay time in various units of the center. The objective of our study is to prepare an ap propriate treatment scheduling algorithm for patients in GHMC by using the recorded sta y time data.

2) Method of Research
All patients, doctors and radiotherapy technicians of GHMC were being issued a specific semi-active IC tag routinely since September 2010. When they pass by a tag reader (RFI D reader) placed near a door the time stamp was recorded at that point of time in the s erver, which was later used to calculate their stay time inside a particular room or un it inside GHMC. For this study we retrieved and sorted out the time stamp records of va rious cancer patients, doctors, and radiotherapy technicians from September 2010 to Nov ember 2013. The raw data was sorted out depending on data of patients and radiotherapy technicians.

The stay time of patients and their facing time with radiotherapy technicians were divi ded into a few specified periods depending on the treatment duration and availability o f data in prostatic cancer, liver cancer, and lung cancer. Comparison was then made bet ween days of a particular period and also between respective days of different periods using the two tailed t-test.

3) Outcome and Consideration
It was found that in each period, the stay time in treatment unit is considerably reduc ed in the last several days as compared to the 1st day of treatment of prostatic cancer. In the inter-period comparison analysis, it was noticed that stay time of patients as well as the facing time with radiotherapy technicians in treatment unit was significant ly lesser in the later period. There was a tendency that the stay time in treatment uni t was decreased in liver and lung cancer. However, no significant difference was notice d in patient’s stay time data in examination room with doctors.

4) Conclusion
Our data suggest that the patient compliance and set up time by radiotherapy technician s is gradually improved as patient’s treatment progresses. Also, with time after insta llation of the center, skill of the technicians has improved leading to reduced stay ti me in later periods. This implies that RFID technology is a feasible method to assess t he resource utilization efficiency & also for generating scheduling algorithms based on the plateauing stay time values.