The Location Problem of Medical Drone Vertiports for Emergency Cardiac Arrest Needs

Abstract

The implementation of medical drones can quickly and efficiently expand the coverage range of an area, allowing for a faster response to incidences of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and improving the subsequent survival rate of such incidences, while promoting sustainable health development goals under the configuration standards for automatic external defibrillators in China. In response to the problem of the selection of locations for medical drone vertiports (for take-off and landing) that are equipped with automatic external defibrillation facilities, a survival function was introduced to establish a model for site selection, with the primary optimization objective of maximizing the average survival rate of patients and taking the operating costs of a system into account. At the same time, considering the constraints of drone phase operation time, energy consumption, coverage range, etc., a medical drone vertiport site selection model was established for emergency cardiac arrest needs. An improved immune algorithm was applied to the model’s calculations and the analysis of the results, using the Jinnan District in Tianjin as an example. The results show that the proposed model and algorithm are feasible and applicable. The Jinnan District in the city of Tianjin requires a total of 24 medical drone vertiports in order to achieve full coverage of an area under the “golden 4-minute” rescue time. When the average survival rate of patients is 0.9, the operation results are deemed optimal, and the average survival rate of patients is 64.06%. Compared to ground ambulances currently used in hospitals, the implementation of medical drones could significantly shorten response time, improve the average survival rate of patients by 41.96%, and effectively improve the existing low survival rate and the accessibility of medical services. The results of this study can provide decision-making support for the planning of automatic external defibrillators in public places and the construction of sustainable and efficient emergency medical service systems.