[R] SPLUS Seqtrial vs. R Packages for sequential clinical trials designs

[Paul Miller]

Hello Everyone,
 
I’m a SAS user who has recently become interested in sequential clinical 
trials designs. I’ve discovered that the SAS based approaches for these 
designs are either too costly or are “experimental.” So now I’m looking 
for alternative software. Two programs that seem promising are SPLUS Seqtrial 
and R.
 
I recently obtained a 30 day trial for the SPLUS Seqtrial add-on and have 
worked my way through most of the examples in the manual. I’ve also gotten 
access to R, installed a package called gsDesign, and worked through most of 
the examples in its documentation. 
 
Although I don’t yet have a good understanding of the various approaches to 
sequential clinical trials designs, I thought that the gsDesign package seemed 
very impressive. I also understand that there are several other R packages that 
relate to sequential clinical trials designs, such as AGSDest , GroupSeq, 
ldbounds, MChtest, PwrGSD, and Seqmon. Some of these seem fairly comprehensive 
while others seem to focus on a single approach. 
 
My questions center on the adequacy of SPLUS Seqtrial and the R Packages. I was 
wondering if there is anyone out there who would be familiar enough with these 
to comment on their relative merits. Will SPLUS Seqtrial or the R packages 
allow me to do all the designs I’m ever likely to need? If I pay for SPLUS 
Seqtrial, will I get anything that I can’t get using the various R packages? 
Are any of the R packages comprehensive? Or would it at least be possible to 
cover all the types of designs that are commonly used by employing a variety of 
R packages? What kind of validation work generally goes into an R package and 
how would this likely compare to the sort of validation work that has gone into 
Seqtrial?
 
There may be other questions that I should be asking but haven’t thought of. 
 
At any rate, if some of you would be willing to share some advice or insights 
I’d greatly appreciate it.
 
Thanks,
 
Paul


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