Abstract

Cancer maps can provide important clues concerning geographical variability in the etiology, prevention, screelling or treatment of cancer. As in all medical research, it ts important to determine whether any variation observed may reasonably be due to chance or not. This can be done using tests for spatial randomness, adjusting for the uneven geographical population density. Many such tests have been proposed, but for most, little is known about their properties, and they are seldomly used in cancer atlases. In this methodological project we will (i) develop theoretical properties that any test for spatial randomness should fulfill in order to be useful for cancer maps, (ii) determine which test statistics do and do not fulfifi these properties, (iii) evaluate the statistical power of different test statistics for different alternative hypotheses, (iv) determine the ability of different tests to estimate cluster model parameters when the null hypothesis is rejected, and (v) evaluate and ifiustrate the practical use of different test statistics on, among other data sets, county based brain cancer mortality data from the United States and individually geocoded breast cancer treatment data from Connecticut.

  Funding Agency

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Cancer Institute (NCI)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01CA095979-04
Application #
6779146
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-SNEM-2 (02))
Program Officer
Tiwari, Ram C
Project Start
2002-08-01
Project End
2006-07-31
Budget Start
2004-08-01
Budget End
2005-07-31
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
2004
Total Cost
$408,751
Indirect Cost

  Institution

Name
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc.
Department
Type
DUNS #
071721088
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02215

  Publications

Puett, Rc; Lawson, Ab; Clark, Ab et al. (2010) Power Evaluation of Focused Cluster Tests. Environ Ecol Stat 17:303-316
Abrams, Allyson M; Kleinman, Ken; Kulldorff, Martin (2010) Gumbel based p-value approximations for spatial scan statistics. Int J Health Geogr 9:61
Hinrichsen, Virginia L; Klassen, Ann C; Song, Changhong et al. (2009) Evaluation of the performance of tests for spatial randomness on prostate cancer data. Int J Health Geogr 8:41
Rusiecki, Jennifer A; Kulldorff, Martin; Nuckols, John R et al. (2006) Geographically based investigation of prostate cancer mortality in four U.S. Northern Plain states. Am J Prev Med 30:S101-8
Song, Changhong; Kulldorff, Martin (2006) Likelihood based tests for spatial randomness. Stat Med 25:825-39
Kulldorff, Martin; Song, Changhong; Gregorio, David et al. (2006) Cancer map patterns: are they random or not? Am J Prev Med 30:S37-49
Fang, Zixing; Kulldorff, Martin; Gregorio, David I (2004) Brain cancer mortality in the United States, 1986 to 1995: a geographic analysis. Neuro Oncol 6:179-87