INESC TEC paper with the highest number of downloads for the second year in a row
The paper “Operations research in healthcare: a survey” had the highest number of views in 2011 and in 2012 in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research.
14th May 2013
Written by Ana Viana and Abdur Rais, respectively a researcher and a former researcher at INESC TEC, the paper obtained 2519 hits last year, 949 more than the second most viewed paper.
The paper was published online for the first time in August 2010 and according to the researcher Ana Viana, the continuous interest in the paper confirms “that the area of Health is clearly expanding within Operational Research – something we have always believed in and defended”.
“Operations research in healthcare: a survey” presents a survey of the problems in healthcare that have been studied using operational research techniques. The main objective of this survey was for the authors to detect potential research areas that have not yet been explored. “We both knew problems that could be the starting point for our work, but we wanted to find other less explored areas. We thought that the most interesting way to do that would be to define a target for our research – writing a survey”, explains the INESC TEC researcher.
“Looking back, I can say I am glad with this decision. We have certainly improved our knowledge and above all we have found an incredibly interesting problem – an optimisation problem associated with kidney transplants with live donors”, states Ana Viana who besides working at INESC TEC as a researcher is also a lecturer at the Higher Education Engineering Institute in Porto (ISEP). Abdur Rais, a former researcher at INESC TEC, also authored this paper.
One of the areas detected in the article led to project KEP – New models for enhancing the kidney transplantation process. The aim of the project is to research and develop new methods to facilitate the decision-making process and improve decisions associated with kidney transplants with live donors.