No abstract

Background Public access defibrillation programs can improve survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), but automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are rarely available for bystander use at the scene. Drones are an emerging technology that can deliver an AED to the scene of an OHCA for bystander use. We hypothesize that a drone network designed with the aid of a mathematical model combining both optimization and queuing can reduce the time to AED arrival. Methods We applied our model to 53,702 OHCAs that occurred in the eight regions of the Toronto Regional RescuNET between January 1st 2006 and December 31st 2014. Our primary analysis quantified the drone network size required to deliver an AED one, two, or three minutes faster than historical median 911 response times for each region independently. A secondary analysis quantified the reduction in drone resources required if RescuNET was treated as one large coordinated region. Results The region-specific analysis determined that 81 bases and 100 drones would be required to deliver an AED ahead of median 911 response times by three minutes. In the most urban region, the 90th percentile of the AED arrival time was reduced by 6 minutes and 43 seconds relative to historical 911 response times in the region. In the most rural region, the 90th percentile was reduced by 10 minutes and 34 seconds. A single coordinated drone network across all regions required 39.5% fewer bases and 30.0% fewer drones to achieve similar AED delivery times. Conclusion An optimized drone network designed with the aid of a novel mathematical model can substantially reduce the AED delivery time to an OHCA event.

We automatically generate intensity-modulated radiation therapy plans for oropharyngeal cancer by combining knowledge-based planning (KBP) predictions with an inverse optimization (IO) pipeline into a single automated treatment planning pipeline. We extended two existing KBP methods, which use patients' anatomical geometry to predict achievable dose volume histograms (DVHs), and developed the first IO method that takes DVHs as direct inputs. The DVH predictions from KBP are put into the IO pipeline to automatically generate treatment plans via an intermediate step using objective function weights and an inverse planning problem. This step enables our automated planning pipeline to seamlessly fuse with the current treatment planning paradigm to increase its efficiency. Our automated pipeline can replicate, and often improve upon the clinical treatment plans by reducing the dose to healthy tissue and increasing primary target coverage. These results have been validated using a large cohort of 217 oropharyngeal cancer patients.ii Dedicated to Leslie.iii

We developed and evaluated a novel inverse optimization (IO) model to estimate objective function weights from clinical dose-volume histograms (DVHs). These weights were used to solve a treatment planning problem to generate ‘inverse plans’ that had similar DVHs to the original clinical DVHs. Our methodology was applied to 217 clinical head and neck cancer treatment plans that were previously delivered at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Canada. Inverse plan DVHs were compared to the clinical DVHs using objective function values, dose-volume differences, and frequency of clinical planning criteria satisfaction. Median differences between the clinical and inverse DVHs were within 1.1 Gy. For most structures, the difference in clinical planning criteria satisfaction between the clinical and inverse plans was at most 1.4%. For structures where the two plans differed by more than 1.4% in planning criteria satisfaction, the difference in average criterion violation was less than 0.5 Gy. Overall, the inverse plans were very similar to the clinical plans. Compared with a previous inverse optimization method from the literature, our new inverse plans typically satisfied the same or more clinical criteria, and had consistently lower fluence heterogeneity. Overall, this paper demonstrates that DVHs, which are essentially summary statistics, provide sufficient information to estimate objective function weights that result in high quality treatment plans. However, as with any summary statistic that compresses three-dimensional dose information, care must be taken to avoid generating plans with undesirable features such as hotspots; our computational results suggest that such undesirable spatial features were uncommon. Our IO-based approach can be integrated into the current clinical planning paradigm to better initialize the planning process and improve planning efficiency. It could also be embedded in a knowledge-based planning or adaptive radiation therapy framework to automatically generate a new plan given a predicted or updated target DVH, respectively.

The authors demonstrated that the KNN and MLR weight prediction methodologies perform comparably to the LR model and can produce clinical quality treatment plans by simultaneously predicting multiple weights that capture trade-offs associated with sparing multiple OARs.

In conclusion, the minimum required sample size needed to accurately train KBP models for prostate cancer depends on the specific model and endpoint to be predicted. The authors' results may provide a lower bound for more complicated tumor sites.

Improving Ambulance Response Times in Developing Urban Centers

Objectives The objectives of this study are to construct the high definition phenotype (HDP), a novel time-series data structure composed of both primary and derived parameters, using heterogeneous clinical sources and to determine whether different predictive models can utilize the HDP in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to improve neonatal mortality prediction in clinical settings. Materials and Methods A total of 49 primary data parameters were collected from July 2018 to May 2020 from eight level-III NICUs. From a total of 1546 patients, 757 patients were found to contain sufficient fixed, intermittent, and continuous data to create HDPs. Two different predictive models utilizing the HDP, one a logistic regression model (LRM) and the other a deep learning long–short-term memory (LSTM) model, were constructed to predict neonatal mortality at multiple time points during the patient hospitalization. The results were compared with previous illness severity scores, including SNAPPE, SNAPPE-II, CRIB, and CRIB-II. Results A HDP matrix, including 12 221 536 minutes of patient stay in NICU, was constructed. The LRM model and the LSTM model performed better than existing neonatal illness severity scores in predicting mortality using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) metric. An ablation study showed that utilizing continuous parameters alone results in an AUC score of >80% for both LRM and LSTM, but combining fixed, intermittent, and continuous parameters in the HDP results in scores >85%. The probability of mortality predictive score has recall and precision of 0.88 and 0.77 for the LRM and 0.97 and 0.85 for the LSTM. Conclusions and Relevance The HDP data structure supports multiple analytic techniques, including the statistical LRM approach and the machine learning LSTM approach used in this study. LRM and LSTM predictive models of neonatal mortality utilizing the HDP performed better than existing neonatal illness severity scores. Further research is necessary to create HDP–based clinical decision tools to detect the early onset of neonatal morbidities.