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Analyzing and effectively communicating the efficacy and toxicity of treatment is the basis of risk benefit analysis (RBA). More efficient and objective tools are needed. We apply Chauhan Weighted Trajectory Analysis (CWTA) to perform RBA with superior objectivity, power, and clarity. We used CWTA to perform 1000-fold simulations of RCTs using ordinal endpoints for both treatment efficacy and toxicity. RCTs were simulated with 1:1 allocation at defined sample sizes and hazard ratios. We studied the simplest case of 3 levels each of toxicity and efficacy and the general case of the advanced cancer trial, with efficacy graded by five RECIST 1.1 health statuses and toxicity by the six-point CTCAE scale (6 x 5 matrix). The latter model was applied to a real-world dose escalation phase I trial in advanced cancer. Simulations in both the 3 x 3 and the 6 x 5 advanced cancer matrix confirmed that drugs with both superior efficacy and toxicity profiles synergize for greater statistical power with CWTA-RBA. The CWTA-RBA 6 x 5 matrix reduced sample size requirements over CWTA efficacy-only analysis. Application to the dose finding phase I clinical trial provided objective, statistically significant validation for the selected dose. CWTA-RBA, by incorporating both drug efficacy and toxicity, provides a single test statistic and plot that analyzes and effectively communicates therapeutic risks and benefits. CWTA-RBA requires fewer patients than CWTA efficacy-only analysis when the experimental drug is both more effective and less toxic. CWTA-RBA facilitates the objective and efficient assessment of new therapies throughout the drug development pathway. Furthermore, several advantages over competing tests in communicating risk-benefit will assist regulatory review, clinical adoption, and understanding of therapeutic risks and benefits by clinicians and patients alike.

As Kaplan-Meier (KM) analysis is limited to single unidirectional endpoints, most advanced cancer randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are powered for either progression free survival (PFS) or overall survival (OS). This discards efficacy information carried by partial responses, complete responses, and stable disease that frequently precede progressive disease and death. Chauhan Weighted Trajectory Analysis (CWTA) is a generalization of KM that simultaneously assesses multiple rank-ordered endpoints. We hypothesized that CWTA could use this efficacy information to reduce sample size requirements and expedite efficacy signals in advanced cancer trials. We performed 100-fold and 1000-fold simulations of solid tumour systemic therapy RCTs with health statuses rank ordered from complete response (Stage 0) to death (Stage 4). At increments of sample size and hazard ratio, we compared KM PFS and OS with CWTA for (i) sample size requirements to achieve a power of 0.8 and (ii) time-to-first significant efficacy signal. CWTA consistently demonstrated greater power, and reduced sample size requirements by 18% to 35% compared to KM PFS and 14% to 20% compared to KM OS. CWTA also expedited time-to-efficacy signals 2- to 6-fold. CWTA, by incorporating all efficacy signals in the cancer treatment trajectory, provides clinically relevant reduction in required sample size and meaningfully expedites the efficacy signals of cancer treatments compared to KM PFS and KM OS. Using CWTA rather than KM as the primary trial outcome has the potential to meaningfully reduce the numbers of patients, trial duration, and costs to evaluate therapies in advanced cancer.

The Kaplan-Meier estimator (KM) is widely used in medical research to estimate the survival function from lifetime data. KM is a powerful tool to evaluate clinical trials due to simple computational requirements, a logrank hypothesis test, and the ability to censor patients. However, KM has several constraints and fails to generalize to ordinal variables of interest such as toxicity and ECOG performance. We devised Weighted Trajectory Analysis (WTA) to combine the advantages of KM with the ability to compare treatment groups for ordinal variables and fluctuating outcomes. To assess statistical significance, we developed a new hypothesis test analogous to the logrank test. We demonstrate the functionality of WTA through 1000-fold clinical trial simulations of unique stochastic models of chemotherapy toxicity and schizophrenia progression. At several increments of sample size and hazard ratio, we compare the performance of WTA to both KM and Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE). WTA generally required half the sample size to achieve comparable power to KM; advantages over GEE include its robust non-parametric approach and summary plot. We also apply WTA to real clinical data: the toxicity outcomes of melanoma patients receiving immunotherapy and the disease progression of patients with metastatic breast cancer receiving ramucirumab. The application of WTA demonstrates that using traditional methods such as percent incidence and KM can lead to both Type I and II errors by failing to model illness trajectory. This article outlines a novel method for clinical outcome assessment that extends the advantages of Kaplan-Meier estimates to ordinal outcome variables., Comment: 29 pages, 3 tables, 10 figures

Unsupervised and self-supervised learning methods have leveraged unlabelled data to improve the pretrained models. However, these methods need significantly large amount of unlabelled data and the computational cost of training models with such large amount of data can be prohibitively high. We address this issue by using unlabelled data during finetuning, instead of pretraining. We propose acoustic model finetuning (FT) using labelled and unlabelled data. The model is jointly trained to learn representations to classify senones, as well as learn contextual acoustic representations. Our training objective is a combination of cross entropy loss, suitable for classification task, and contrastive loss, suitable to learn acoustic representations. The proposed approach outperforms conventional finetuning with 11.2% and 9.19% word error rate relative (WERR) reduction on Gujarati and Bengali languages respectively.