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Abstract:
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A dynamic treatment regime, also known as a treatment policy or multistage treatment strategy, is a set of formal rules for what physicians do routinely when treating a patient in multiple stages. The physician makes a baseline diagnosis by evaluating the patient's signs and symptoms, chooses and administers an initial treatment, observes the patient's outcomes, and uses all of this information to choose the next treatment. This process is repeated until criteria for stopping the patient's therapy are met. I will describe some cancer clinical trials involving multi-stage dynamic treatment regimes that I have designed using both Bayesian and frequentist methods. I also will discuss some of the practicalities, computational requirements, and statistical issues arising in the design and conduct of clinical trials involving dynamic treatment regimes.
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