Modular Approach to Dose Finding Clinical Trials

Methods for working with dose-finding clinical trials. We start by providing a common interface to various dose-finding methodologies like the continual reassessment method (CRM) by O'Quigley et al. (1990) , the Bayesian optimal interval design (BOIN) by Liu & Yuan (2015) , and the 3+3 described by Korn et al. (1994) . We then add optional embellishments to provide extra desirable behaviour, like avoiding skipping doses, stopping after n patients have been treated at the recommended dose, or demanding that n patients are treated before stopping is allowed. By daisy-chaining together these embellishments using the pipe operator from 'magrittr', it is simple to tailor the behaviour of dose-finding designs so that they do what you want. Furthermore, using this flexible interface for creating dose-finding designs, it is simple to run simulations or calculate dose-pathways for future cohorts of patients.