Experimental study of Magnetic Resonance Imaging examination reservation process for stroke patients

Stroke patients need timely imaging examinations in order to have the appropriate diagnosis and treatment. We have proposed a contract-based Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reservation process in order to reduce their waiting time for MRI examinations. Stroke patients can be examined by either contracted time slots (CTS) especially reserved for them or regular time slots (RTS). RTS assignment policy is to assign some “unlucky” patients to RTS by keeping CTS queue length below a certain threshold. This paper proposes a scheduling method in order to reduce the waiting time of these “unlucky” patients. RTS assignment policy is used to reserve RTS with no patients assigned to RTS at the same time. All the patients use CTS plus RTS reserved based on FIFO (First In First Out) scheduling policy. Computational results show that the improved method can greatly reduce the maximal waiting time and the deviation of average waiting time.