Multicentre study desing in survival analysis.

Survival analysis is an important part of medical statistics or for the study of failures in mechanical systems. The latter is called reliability analysis in engineering. This paper addresses the survival analysis in medical research. In this context of medical research, the survival analysis is frequently used to define prognostic indices for survival or recurrence of a disease, and to study outcome of treatment. Within the broader domain of medical survival analysis or more specifically for the study of patients with cancer disease, there are a number of clinical/prognostic techniques developed over the last half of century in many research groups, universities and hospitals around the globe. Despite numerous publications on each of these techniques, there is still a need of evaluating the numerical outputs of the different prognostic algorithms on identical medical datasets. Hence the need to benchmark the mathematical algorithms against the available medical and other cancer datasets held by various research groups from universities or hospitals. The main scope of a benchmark process is to specifically inform and to provide prognostic advice and choice of post-operative adjuvant therapy. It is also essential to define data acquisition protocols, to create the necessary databases on which the benchmarked methodologies can be tested. In case there are several research groups which are taking part in a benchmark study, then they form a multicentre study. This paper presents the steps to be followed in order to realize such a multicentre study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]