Introduction to Statistical Methods in Pathology pp 201-218 | Cite as
Survival Analysis
Abstract
While pathology and laboratory medicine are the cornerstones of diagnostic medicine, they also play a crucial and central role in prognostication. One of the most important prognostic questions is survival. The aim of prognostication often is to determine the survival outlook for patients. For anatomic pathologists, the staging and grading of tumors is performed because of proven survival differences between different tumor grades and stages.
Survival data is different from other data types that we have discussed thus far; the survival data captures the time to failure event (often death or recurrence of the disease). The statistical tools that deal with survival data are also different and are derived from a specific probability distribution known as the survival function.
In this chapter, we will explain the concept of survival and introduce the statistical tools used in survival analysis.
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