Robust treatment comparison based on utilities of semi-competing risks in non-small-cell lung cancer

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

12:00 PM-1:00 PM

The Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics welcomes Thomas Murray, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who will present:

Robust treatment comparison based on utilities of semi-competing risks in non-small-cell lung cancer

This talk will describe a design for a randomized clinical trial comparing two second-line treatments for recurrent non-small-cell lung cancer, chemotherapy versus chemotherapy plus reirradiation. The research question is whether the potential efficacy benefit that adding reirradiation to chemotherapy may provide justifies its potential for increasing the risk of toxicity. The design uses co-primary outcomes that are semi-competing risks: time to disease progression or death, and time to severe toxicity. A conditionally conjugate Bayesian model that is robust to misspecification is formulated using piecewise exponential distributions. A numerical utility function is elicited from the physicians that characterizes the desirability of the possible realizations for the co-primary outcome. A comparative test based on posterior mean utilities is proposed. A simulation study is presented to evaluate test performance for a variety of treatment differences, and a sensitivity assessment to the elicited utility function is performed.

Contact Information

Nancy Colon-Anderson
nanderson@drexel.edu