A Contribution to the Comparison of the Efficacy of Radiotherapeutic Procedures in Cervical Carcinoma

Abstract

This paper presents a new method in which the regression velocity of cervical carcinoma is measured by computer tomography and the results evaluated by two statistical methods: non-linear regression analysis and survival analysis. By means of this approach it was possible to compare the early effect of therapy in patients treated with intracavitary application of ²²⁶Ra plus external radiotherapy with those treated with ²⁵²Cf, ²²⁶Ra and extended radiotherapy. In the latter group a higher efficacy of the therapy was demonstrated by both statistical methods. As the timing between external and intracavitary radiotherapy was different in the two groups and as ²⁵²Cf contributed to a rather small part of the total radiation dose it could not be concluded that the difference in efficacy really was due to ²⁵²Cf. Of essential interest was, however, that an obvious difference in efficacy could be found between two slightly different treatment techniques. The statistical procedure called survival analysis, used here parallelly with weighed regression analysis seemed to give better results than a classical regression analysis and can thus be recommended for processing of clinical data of the type which is discussed in this paper.