B0750
Title: Residual mean survival times in the presence of cure fractions in a two-sample problem
Authors: Dennis Dobler - TU Dortmund (Germany) [presenting]
Eni Musta - University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Abstract: Many serious diseases do not end fatally for the patient. In such cases, the classical Kaplan-Meier estimator or Cox models might not be the best approach to assess survival chances. Instead, cure models incorporate the fact that a fraction of the patients will never experience the event of interest. Our research is driven by the question: if the cure fraction is similar for two available treatments, how else can we determine which is preferable? To this end, we estimate the residual mean survival times in the uncured fractions of both treatment groups and develop permutation tests for inference. These are based on non- or semiparametric approaches. The methods are illustrated with medical data of cancer patients.
