gsDesign Explorer: Easy-to-Use Open Source GUI- and R-Based Group Sequential Design Software

• Activity Number: 534
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Keaven M. Anderson+ and William Constantine* and Jason B. Clark
• Companies: Merck Research Laboratories and REvolution Computing and Merck Research Laboratories
• Keywords: clinical trial design ; R ; open source ; group sequential methods ; spending functions

Abstract

Innovation in adaptive designs is evidenced by the high rate of publications in this area. Open source software can provide significant acceleration of acceptance of new methods. We present software for group sequential methods reflecting recently developed methods for generating appropriate spending functions for group sequential design by Anderson and Clark (Stat in Med, 2010). These methods propose reverse engineering spending function selection based on desired interim clinical and statistical criteria and provide flexible spending function families for this purpose. Traditional spending function families are also supported. Graphical and printed summaries (e.g., latex) are included. gsDesign Explorer provides a GUI to the gsDesign R package for simple training and implementation. The interface was developed using an open source interface builder, Qt Creator.