Frontiers in Biostatistics Seminar

October 13, 2020
1:00PM

Lu Tian, PhD
Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science in the School of Medicine
Stanford University

It is appealing to compared survival distributions based on restricted mean survival time (RMST), since it generates a clinically interpretable summary of the treatment effect, which can be estimated nonparametrically without assuming restrictive model assumptions such as the proportional hazards assumption. However, there are special challenges in designing and analyzing group sequential study based on RMST, because the truncation timepoint of the RMST in the interim analysis often differs from that in the final analysis. A valid test controls the unconditional type one error has been developed in the past. However, there is no appropriate statistical procedure for constructing the confidence interval for the treatment effect measured by a contrast in RMST, while it is crucial for informative clinical decision making. In this talk, I will review some important design issues for study based on RMST. I will then discuss how to conduct hypothesis testing and how to construct confidence intervals for the difference RMST in a group sequential setting. Examples and numerical studies will be presented to illustrate the method.

A recording of this seminar is available on your YouTube Channel.