Disease progression models : A review and comparison

A better understanding of disease progression is beneficial for early diagnosis and appropriate individual therapy. There are many different approaches for statistical modelling of disease progression proposed in the literature, including simple path models up to complex restricted Bayesian networks. Important fields of application are diseases like cancer and HIV. Tumour progression is measured by means of chromosome aberrations, whereas people infected with HIV develop drug resistances because of genetic changes of the HI-virus. These two very different diseases have typical courses of disease progression, which can be modelled partly by consecutive and partly by independent steps. This paper gives an overview of the different progression models and points out their advantages and drawbacks. Different models are compared via simulations to analyse how they work if some of their assumptions are violated. So far, such a comparison has not been done and there are no established methods to compare different progression models. This paper is a step into both directions.

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