Finding The Optimal Trial Design Using Operations Research Methods

By Mansha Sachdev

With the cloud computing power that we have today, we can run simulation of 1000s of designs with each design replicated 1000s of times. However, trial designs are increasing in complexity and finding the optimal design from the millions of possible design options requires interactive blending of skilled judgement and statistical models. The best design involves tradeoffs between several performance criteria such as timelines, resources, upfront costs, and study power.

At the 2021 PSI Online Conference, Cytel co-founder Nitin Patel presented a discussion on applying operations research (OR) methods to trial design selection. Nitin demonstrated two optimization constructs from OR — Pareto Optimality and Convexity — to efficiently identify the best clinical trial designs from a large set of simulated designs.