Laparoscopic surgery training tasks are a prime example of tasks requiring psychomotor skills. A typical evaluation of psychomotor skills can be accomplished using learning curves. Learning curves have been generated from the performance metrics within specific psychomotor skill tasks previously; however, these learning curves do not directly measure the information that a repetition of the task provides. Thus, we propose an information-theoretic model to measure the information gained from task repetitions. A total of 20 participants repeated a laparoscopic matchboard training task until a proficiency metric was reached. The proposed probability model, used in the information gain framework, was then calibrated using 16 randomly chosen participants’ trials to proficiency and validated by simulating four new sample trials tested against the remaining participant’s data. It was found that the average number of trials to proficiency was 27 trials corresponding to an information gain of 0.0136 units for an extra repetition. Utilizing the information gained for stopping training complements available proficiency metrics for adjudicating proficiency in motor skills tasks and provides several advantages.

Identifying the right dose is one of the most important decisions in drug development. Adaptive designs are promoted to conduct dose-finding clinical trials as they are more efficient and ethical compared with static designs. However, current techniques in response-adaptive designs for dose allocation are complex and need significant computational effort, which is a major impediment for implementation in practice. This study proposes a Bayesian nonparametric framework for estimating the dose-response curve, which uses a piecewise linear approximation to the curve by consecutively connecting the expected mean response at each dose. Our extensive numerical results reveal that a first-order Bayesian nonparametric model with a known correlation structure in prior for the expected mean response performs competitively when compared with the standard approach and other more complex models in terms of several relevant metrics and enjoys computational efficiency. Furthermore, structural properties for the optimal learning problem, which seeks to minimize the variance of the target dose, are established under this simple model. Summary of Contribution: In this work, we propose a methodology to derive efficient patient allocation rules in response-adaptive dose-finding clinical trials, where computational issues are the main concern. We show that our methodologies are competitive with the state-of-the-art methodology in terms of solution quality, are significantly more computationally efficient, and are more robust in terms of the shape of the dose-response curve, among other parameter changes. This research fits in “the intersection of computing and operations research” as it adapts operations research techniques to produce computationally attractive solutions to patient allocation problems in dose-finding clinical trials.

In this work, we study the optimal design of two-armed clinical trials to maximize the accuracy of parameter estimation in a statistical model, where the interaction between patient covariates and treatment are explicitly incorporated to enable precision medication decisions. Such a modeling extension leads to significant complexities for the produced optimization problems because they include optimization over design and covariates concurrently. We take a min-max optimization model and minimize (over design) the maximum (over population) variance of the estimated interaction effect between treatment and patient covariates. This results in a min-max bilevel mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, which is notably challenging to solve. To address this challenge, we introduce a surrogate optimization model by approximating the objective function, for which we propose two solution approaches. The first approach provides an exact solution based on reformulation and decomposition techniques. In the second approach, we provide a lower bound for the inner optimization problem and solve the outer optimization problem over the lower bound. We test our proposed algorithms with synthetic and real-world data sets and compare them with standard (re)randomization methods. Our numerical analysis suggests that the proposed approaches provide higher-quality solutions in terms of the variance of estimators and probability of correct selection. We also show the value of covariate information in precision medicine clinical trials by comparing our proposed approaches to an alternative optimal design approach that does not consider the interaction terms between covariates and treatment. Summary of Contribution: Precision medicine is the future of healthcare where treatment is prescribed based on each patient information. Designing precision medicine clinical trials, which are the cornerstone of precision medicine, is extremely challenging because sample size is limited and patient information may be multidimensional. This work proposes a novel approach to optimally estimate the treatment effect for each patient type in a two-armed clinical trial by reducing the largest variance of personalized treatment effect. We use several statistical and optimization techniques to produce efficient solution methodologies. Results have the potential to save countless lives by transforming the design and implementation of future clinical trials to ensure the right treatments for the right patients. Doing so will reduce patient risks and reduce costs in the healthcare system.

A broad range of scientific simulations involve solving large-scale computationally expensive linear systems of equations. Iterative solvers are typically preferred over direct methods when it comes to large systems due to their lower memory requirements and shorter execution times. However, selecting the appropriate iterative solver is problem-specific and dependent on the type and symmetry of the coefficient matrix. Gauss-Seidel (GS) is an iterative method for solving linear systems that are either strictly diagonally dominant or symmetric positive definite. This technique is an improved version of Jacobi and typically converges in fewer iterations. However, the sequential nature of this algorithm complicates the parallel extraction. In fact, most parallel derivatives of GS rely on the sparsity pattern of the coefficient matrix and require matrix reordering or domain decomposition. In this article, we introduce a new algorithm that exploits the convergence property of GS and adapts the parallel structure of Jacobi. The proposed method works for both dense and sparse systems and is straightforward to implement. We have examined the performance of our method on multicore and many-core architectures. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared with GS and Jacobi. Additionally, performance comparison with built-in Krylov solvers in MATLAB showed that in terms of time per iteration, Krylov methods perform faster on CPUs, but our approach is significantly better when executed on GPUs. Lastly, we apply our method to solve the power flow problem, and the results indicate a significant improvement in runtime, reaching up to 87 times faster speed compared with GS.

Motivated to apply sustainable supply chain principles to air-pollution control systems, this paper presents a dynamic inventory-management approach where substitution is possible to maintain these systems’ equipment. An air-pollution control system’s subsequent reliability depends on the replacement equipment selected. The corresponding problem is formulated as a stochastic dynamic program. Because the state and action space are prohibitively large, the approximate policy iteration algorithm is adapted to generate high-quality solutions. Therefore, this work replaces the value function with an affine combination of nonlinear basis functions and shows that a relaxation of the policy improvement step requires the solving of a mixed integer linear program. This approach helps in the designing of an algorithm that improves the quality of the approximation by solving a convex optimization problem. To assess the quality of resulting solutions, a lower bound is developed by considering a relaxation of the problem. In addition, two classes of heuristics are proposed based on a rolling-horizon two-stage stochastic programming formulation of the problem and a standard base-stock ordering policy. The performance of proposed policies is tested on a variety of settings, and results show that the approximate dynamic programming policies are near-optimal in the settings of interest and significantly outperform available benchmarks. The following analysis reveals that the proposed inventory replenishment policies resemble a base-stock policy with occasional deviations, and assignment and substitution decisions are determined by balancing the reliability with ordering, holding, and shortage costs. The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2017.0794 .