Please join us for the inaugural seminar of the MGH Biostatistics Applied Biostatistics Seminar Series, a new seminar series designed to introduce researchers to intermediate topics that are highly relevant to clinical biostatistical research. Presenters will join us on every 3rd Friday of each month to introduce us to their area of expertise and motivate the use of these methods with concrete clinical examples.
Semi-competing risks: modeling and joint prediction of dependent non-terminal and terminal events
Friday November 19, 2021, 1:00-2:00pm
Hybrid event: In-person and on Zoom (see details below)
MGH Biostatistics Conference Room, 50 Staniford St Ste 560
or https://partners.zoom.us/j/86551137602
Speaker: Harrison T. Reeder, PhD Candidate, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
Abstract: Semi-competing risks refers to the survival analysis setting where the occurrence of a non-terminal event is subject to whether a terminal event has occurred, but not vice versa. Semi-competing risks arise across a broad range of clinical contexts, but are not always recognized as such, leading researchers to pursue analyses that ignore the dependence between events, or focus solely on a single or composite outcome. In particular, unlike standard competing risks, semi-competing risks provide an opportunity to learn about the joint risk of the two events, enabling individualized risk prediction of patients’ entire outcome trajectories across time. In this talk we will build on familiar survival analysis tools to introduce the frailty-based illness-death model for semi-competing risks. This framework captures the complex interplay between risk factors and the joint outcomes, and aligns with the needs of clinical decision makers. We illustrate this with recent work on joint prediction in two clinical settings: preeclampsia and delivery during pregnancy, and shock and death among heart failure patients receiving implantable cardioverter defibrillators.
This will be a hybrid in-person/virtual event. Harrison will be joining us in-person and MGH employees who would like to attend in-person are welcome to do so. The option to attend virtually will be made available to all. Due to COVID protocols, non-MGH employees are not permitted to attend in-person at this time. Please contact tthaweethai@mgh.harvard.edu with any questions.
Upcoming seminars:
Kaitlyn Cook, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute. Topic: Interval-censored data and HIV prevention trials
Zoe Guan, PhD. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Topic: Neural networks and prediction of hereditary cancers
