6,326 research outputs found
Histopathology laboratory operations analysis and improvement
Histopathology laboratories aim to deliver high quality diagnoses based on patient tissue samples. Indicators for quality are the accuracy of the diagnoses and the diagnostic turnaround times. However, challenges exist regarding employee workload and turnaround times in the histopathology laboratory. This paper proposes a decomposed planning and scheduling method for the histopathology laboratory using (mixed) integer linear programming ((M)ILP) to improve the spread of workload and reduce the diagnostic turnaround times. First, the batching problem is considered, in which batch completion times are equally divided over the day to spread the workload. This reduces the peaks of physical work available in the laboratory. Thereafter, the remaining processes are scheduled to minimize the tardiness of orders. Preliminary results show that using this decomposition method, the peaks in histopathology workload in UMC Utrecht, a large university medical center in the Netherlands, are potentially reduced with up to 50% by better spreading the workload over the day. Furthermore, turnaround times are potentially reduced with up to 20% compared to current practices
Comparative Study on Agile software development methodologies
Today-s business environment is very much dynamic, and organisations are
constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment.
They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for
accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven
developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software
development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object
oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades
and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software
development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to
satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable
software. It is a set of software development methods based on iterative and
incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve
through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that
allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also
accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly
identify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach
improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business
environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development
methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss
current state of adopting agile methodologies. We speculate that from the need
to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable
software, Agile software development is emerged as an alternative to
traditional plan-based software development methods. The purpose of this paper,
is to provide an in-depth understanding, the major benefits of agile
development approach to software development industry, as well as provide a
comparison study report of ASDM over TSDM.Comment: 25 pages, 25 images, 86 references used, with authors biographie
AID INSTRUMENTS IN FRAGILE STATES
International Development,
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Clinical metagenomics.
Clinical metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), the comprehensive analysis of microbial and host genetic material (DNA and RNA) in samples from patients, is rapidly moving from research to clinical laboratories. This emerging approach is changing how physicians diagnose and treat infectious disease, with applications spanning a wide range of areas, including antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome, human host gene expression (transcriptomics) and oncology. Here, we focus on the challenges of implementing mNGS in the clinical laboratory and address potential solutions for maximizing its impact on patient care and public health
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