A Monte Carlo Reliability Study of the Assessment of Chemotherapy Responses in Ovarian Cancer Treatment

In ovarian cancer treatment there is no single standard criterion adopted for chemotherapy responses assessment. CA-125 is widely used to evaluate chemotherapy responses and doctors experience still play an important role in the judgment of chemotherapy response. It is noted that there are cases whose CA125 values are in the same range but classified differently. The situation becomes complicated as gene profile study provides an alternative for the chemotherapy response prediction, i.e., the assessments based on CA125 are inconsistent with that indicated by the identified gene markers. In this study, we propose a framework to evaluate those cases which are at odds under different criteria. Monte Carlo simulation is designed to evaluate the cases whose values of CA125 fall in the critical range and inconsistent with assessments based upon gene markers. This study also provides framework to analyze doctors' prior on the judgment of chemotherapy response. This work also can be easily applied to other cancer chemotherapy response research.