Lower Confidence Bounds for Time to Cure
针对癌症等致命疾病患者何时可被视为治愈的问题，提出一种非参数方法计算治愈时间的下置信界，并应用于结直肠癌临床试验数据。
Clinicians often wish to know if and when patients with cancer or other life-threatening diseases can be considered cured. Although some parametric approaches are available, no nonparametric methods exist for treating this question. Here, a nonparametric procedure based on the definition that cure occurs when the hazard for death among patients is no longer greater than the hazard among subjects in the general population with similar age and demographic characteristics is developed. It is argued that the use of a fully nonparametric approach cannot lead to a nontrivial upper confidence bound for time to cure, and an approach to computing lower confidence bounds for time to cure is developed and applied to data from a clinical trial in colorectal cancer.