Statistical models for analysing time-to-occurrence data in radiobiology and radiation oncology

Two different methods for analysing late complications data in radiobiology and radiation oncology are contrasted and compared. The two methods are Cox Proportional Hazards model and the Mixture model. The potential limitations of both methods are described together with the circumstances in which one or other of the methods is preferable. Both methods are applied to a mouse spinal cord data set and to a clinical head and neck data set. The bias, efficiency, and coverage rate of confidence intervals and robustness of the two methods are compared in a Monte Carlo simulation. (author)