Statistics in cancer: diagnosis, disease progression, treatment efficacy, and patient survival studies /

Abstract

This article proposes a simple nonparametric measure for diagnosis of cancer and assessing cancer intensity for an individual, without resorting to group data or reduction of dimensionality or scaling or finding weights. The measure also identifies the critical areas/variables requiring attention, can be applied for all non-nominal data, can be used to find mean, variance, and confidence interval for group data, and facilitates statistical tests of hypothesis. The cancer intensity facilitates ranking/classifying a group of patients along with quantifying progress of treatment at individual and group level. Using suitably designed group data, attempt can be made to find a small interval of values of cancer intensity for each type of cancer, which may be associated with Stage IV cancer or metastatic cancer. The proposed measure of cancer intensity offers an alternative approach for estimation of survival function of cancer patients. This study leads to a number of new areas of statistical analysis in cancer treatment. An empirical study will be of vital interest based on this theoretical study.