Ping Hu

NCI, DCP, BRG

PLCO (Learn more about this study)

2010-0076

Oct 22, 2010

Estimation of sensitivity of chest x-ray and cancer preclinical sojourn time for the lung component of the PLCO trial

The effectiveness of cancer screening depends crucially on two elements: the preclinical sojourn time (that is, the duration of the preclinical screen-detectable period) and the sensitivity of the screening test. Chest x-ray has historically been employed most frequently as the major screening test for lung cancer. Little is known about the accuracy of Chest x-ray in community practice. To investigate this issue, one possibility is to use the available methods in prior literatures (Yu Shen and Marvin Zelen, 1999; Xiuyu Cong, etc, 2005). However, these methods first have largely concentrated on breast cancer screening and second are assumed 100% specificity, equivalently the zero false positive rates. It is clear that the data from PLCO cancer screening trial do not support a zero false positive rate. Therefore, it would be interesting to generalize these commonly used methods by considering specificity also as a parameter and to estimate mean sojourn time/mean lead time, sensitivity and specificity simultaneously. It would be also interesting to demonstrate whether the existing methods used in breast cancer screening could be used in lung cancer screening. In this project, we first generalize the method developed by Shen & Zelen (1999) and Cong and Shen (2005) without assuming 100% specificity and then apply the new method to lung component of PLCO cancer screening trial.