The past two weeks have been very busy. I have been on-site at the office of Carolina Oncology Specialists working with the doctors, nurses and staff who will be using Ankhos, and there is a lot of work to be done. Two of the major improvements which have come from this most recent week have been:
Regimen creation UI: While the regimen framework has been fully able to represent and create the complicated chemotherapy regimens designed by the doctors, the UI is not yet ‘easy to use’ in this regard. The doctors and I spent some more time hashing out ideas and hopefully the next iteration will be better.
We are trying to focus more on the vocabulary of the user. For instance, being able to program “once a week for three weeks, skip a week and then a fourth treatment” is more natural to a MD than specifying “Days 1,8,15,29″ for a treatment. We need to figure out how to fit that into a UI.
FTP file dump ingest: I was able to set up the web server and get the automatic file ingest working. The lab machines are currently set up to dump a file each time a patient has their blood drawn. This folder has never been emptied. Ever. This means around 64 thousand files are in each of these folders (multiple machines * multiple office sites = multiple folders)
My original script simply looped through the files in the directory in Python determining, by the modification date of the file, which files to ingest. I quickly learned that this was entirely too slow. What I ended up having to do was perform a ‘ls’ or ‘dir’ command on the directory using the Python subprocess package and let the filesystem do the sorting for me. I’m sure there is a log(n) process in there somewhere, because it certainly made the ingest time acceptable.
