Benjamin Baer, doctoral student in Statistics and Data Science, is the lead author of just-published research in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.
In "The Fragility Index Can Be Used For Sample Size Calculations in Clinical Trials," Baer and coauthors – including Marty Wells, chair and professor of SDS – develop a method that allows clinicians to control for the fragility index during clinical trial design.
From the paper's objective: "The fragility index is a clinically interpretable metric increasingly used to interpret the robustness of clinical trials results that is generally not incorporated in sample size calculation and applied post-hoc. In this manuscript, we propose to base the sample size calculation on the fragility index in a way that supplements the classical pre-fixed alpha and power cutoffs and we provide a dedicated R software package for the design and analysis tools."
The research team includes Mario Gaudino and Mary Charlson, both of Weill Cornell Medicine, and Stephen E. Fremes of the University of Toronto.