Chapman & Hall/CRC Interdisciplinary Statistics: Clinical Trials in Oncology (PDF)

Studies that are unimpeachably thorough, non-political, unbiased, and properly designed... These are the standards to which everyone in clinical research aspires. Yet, the difficulties in designing trials and interpreting data are subtle and ever present. The new edition of Clinical Trials in Oncology provides a concise, nontechnical, and now thoroughly up-to-date review of methods and issues related to clinical trials. The authors emphasize the importance of proper study design, analysis, and data management and identify the major pitfalls that are seemingly inherent in these processes. This edition includes a new section that describes recent innovations in Phase I designs. Another new section on microarray data examines the challenges presented by massive data sets and describes approaches used to meet those challenges. As always, the authors use clear, lucid prose and a multitude of real-world trials as examples to convey the principles of successful trials without the need for a strong statistics or mathematics background. Although the book focuses on cancer trials, the issues and concepts are important in any clinical setting. Clinical Trials in Oncology, Second Edition works to improve the mutual understanding by clinicians and statisticians of the principles of clinical trials and helps them avoid the many hazards that can jeopardize the success of a trial.