Körper-Kunst in der Kinderklinik – ein interdisziplinäres Projekt zwischen Pädiatrie, Tanztheater und Psychosomatik

On the basis of the deconstructive idea of dance as a means to experience inner coherences as well as dehiscences within the body, an interdisciplinary project between psychosomatic medicine, pediatrics and dance is outlined. Social processes between dancers, adolescents and trainer within a single clinically more in detail described workshop are presented and related to the situation of chronically ill children. Hereby, a reintegration of the rejected and negatively charged body in chronic conditions is initialized.     

An information-theoretic approach to surrogate-marker evaluation with failure time endpoints

Over the last decades, the evaluation of potential surrogate endpoints in clinical trials has steadily been growing in importance, not only thanks to the availability of ever more potential markers and surrogate endpoints, also because more methodological development has become available. While early work has been devoted, to a large extent, to Gaussian, binary, and longitudinal endpoints, the case of time-to-event endpoints is in need of careful scrutiny as well, owing to the strong presence of such endpoints in oncology and beyond. While work had been done in the past, it was often cumbersome to use such tools in practice, because of the need for fitting copula or frailty models that were further embedded in a hierarchical or two-stage modeling approach. In this paper, we present a methodologically elegant and easy-to-use approach based on information theory. We resolve essential issues, including the quantification of “surrogacy” based on such an approach. Our results are put to the test in a simulation study and are applied to data from clinical trials in oncology. The methodology has been implemented in R.     

The meta-analytic framework for the evaluation of surrogate endpoints in clinical trials

For a number of reasons, surrogate endpoints are considered instead of the so-called true endpoint in clinical studies, especially when such endpoints can be measured earlier, and/or with less burden for patient and experimenter. Surrogate endpoints may occur more frequently than their standard counterparts. For these reasons, it is not surprising that the use of surrogate endpoints in clinical practice is increasing.     

Estimating precision,repeatability, and reproducibility from Gaussian and non- Gaussian data: a mixed models approach

Quality control relies heavily on the use of formal assessment metrics. In this paper, for the context of veterinary epidemiology, we review the main proposals, precision, repeatability, reproducibility, and intermediate precision, in agreement with ISO (international Organization for Standardization) practice, generalize these by placing them within the linear mixed model framework, which we then extend to the generalized linear mixed model setting, so that both Gaussian as well as non-Gaussian data can be employed. Similarities and differences are discussed between the classical ANOVA (analysis of variance) approach and the proposed mixed model settings, on the one hand, and between the Gaussian and non-Gaussian cases, on the other hand. The new proposals are applied to five studies in three diseases: Aujeszky's disease, enzootic bovine leucosis (EBL) and bovine brucellosis. The mixed-models proposals are also discussed in the light of their computational requirements.