BAYESIAN DECISION PROCEDURES FOR DOSE DETERMINING EXPERIMENTS

This paper describes the Bayesian decision procedure and illustrates t he methodology through an application to dose determination in early p hase clinical trials. The situation considered is quite specific: a fi xed number of patients are available, to be treated one at a time, wit h the choice of dose for any patient requiring knowledge of the respon ses of all previous patients. A continuous range of possible doses is available. The prior beliefs about the dose-response relationship are of a particular form and the gain from investigation is measured in te rms of statistical information gathered. How all of these specificatio ns may be varied is discussed. A comparison with the continual reasses sment method is made.