Advanced Survival Analysis course

Omschrijving

Are you applying survival analysis methods, and do you want to extend your skills? Then register to our Advanced Survival Analysis course to learn state-of-the-art techniques from international experts.

Our comprehensive course will build on standard tools for survival outcomes: the Kaplan-Meier estimator of the survival curve, the log-rank test for testing equality of survival curves and Cox’s proportional hazards regression model. For many common situations these techniques do not suffice, e.g., when more than one event is considered, when the effects of risk factors or treatments change over time, when patients are clustered in groups or when a patient population is compared to the general population. We offer methods for statistical modeling in these settings. Our course delves deeper into a wide range of more specialized topics: non-proportional hazards and time-dependent covariates, competing risks and multi-state models, joint models, landmarking and dynamic prediction, pseudo-observations, frailty models, relative survival, missing data and informative censoring.

There will be a balance between concepts, mathematics, implementation and interpretation. The majority of clinical examples discussed come from the collaborative work of the teachers with clinicians. You will gain hands-on experience with real clinical data in computer practicals to master the methods.

After the course you will have the tools to tackle complex time-to-event problems!

Coordinators

• Hein Putter (Leiden University Medical Center)
• Liesbeth de Wreede (Leiden University Medical Center)

Instructors

• Liesbeth de Wreede (Leiden University Medical Center)
• Hein Putter (Leiden University Medical Center)
• Maja Pohar Perme (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
• Dimitris Rizopoulos (Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam)
• Nan van Geloven (Leiden University Medical Center)
• Edouard Bonneville (Leiden University Medical Center)

Topics covered

The course material will be presented in a lecture format, changing between theory and illustrations. Ample attention will be devoted to the practical implementation of the methods covered in the course, by use of R. The lectures will be complemented by computer practicals in R.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction: Survival analysis, pitfalls and solutions
• Competing risks
• Time-dependent covariates in Cox regression models and landmarking
• Non-proportional hazards
• Pseudo-observations
• Relative survival
• Multi-state models
• Dynamic prediction
• Frailty models
• Missing data
• Informative censoring
• Joint models

Learning strategy

The material will be presented using slides and through class discussion. All slides, which will contain clear descriptions of the methodology, of applications, and of how to implement analyses in R, and exercise material will be made available. Papers for further study will be shared with the participants.

Pre‐requisites

This course is directed at statisticians, epidemiologists and clinicians with a good background in statistics and basic knowledge of mathematics. Participants are expected to have a fair knowledge of the standard techniques from survival analysis.

About the instructors

Hein Putter is full professor at the Leiden University Medical Center (Department of Biomedical Data Sciences). His research interests include competing risks and multi-state models, frailty models and dynamic prediction. He is co-author of the book “Dynamic Prediction in Clinical Survival Analysis”, with Hans van Houwelingen.

Liesbeth de Wreede is assistant professor in medical statistics at Leiden University Medical Center. She mainly works in survival analysis, with a special interest in competing risks and multi-state models, relative survival and methods for missing data. She collaborates with several organizations in the field of haematology.

Maja Pohar Perme is professor of biostatistics at the University of Ljubljana, where she received all her degrees. She is the head of the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the Medical faculty. She is highly involved in the development of statistics in Slovenia, she is the head of the Applied Statistics programme at the University of Ljubljana and she teaches statistics at various faculties both on undergraduate and postgraduate level. She acts as the statistical editor of the Slovenian Medical Journal. Her research focuses on survival analysis with particular interest in relative survival methodology and the use of pseudo-observations. She is the author of the relsurv package in R.

Dimitris Rizopoulos is a Professor in Biostatistics at the Erasmus University Medical Center. He received a Ph.D. in Biostatistics (2008) from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Dr. Rizopoulos wrote his dissertation and several methodological and applied articles on various aspects of models for survival and longitudinal data analysis. He is the author of a book on joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data. He has also written three freely available packages to fit such models in R under maximum likelihood (i.e., package JM) and the Bayesian approach (i.e., packages JMbayes2 and JMbayes). He currently serves as co-Editor for Biostatistics.

Nan van Geloven is assistant professor at the Leiden University Medical Center (Department of Biomedical Data Sciences). Her research focuses on causal analysis of survival data. She works both on trials and on observational data. She has a special interest in defining estimands and in causal prediction, i.e. predicting outcomes under hypothetical interventions conditional on individual characteristics.

Edouard Bonneville is a PhD Candidate in biostatistics at Leiden University Medical Center. His research interests are in survival analysis, with a particular focus on competing risks, joint models and methods for dealing with missing data. He also works as a statistician for the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT).

Location

The course will take place at the Meeting & Event Center of Fletcher Wellness-Hotel Leiden, with excellent conference and catering facilities, very conveniently located next to Leiden Central Station. More detailed information about the schedule and location will be provided upon registration.

Course prices

• Academic participants, early registration (before 15/06/2023): €1250 (ISCB members €1200)
• Academic participants, late registration: €1500 (ISCB members €1450)
• LUMC affiliated: €700
• Non-academic participants: €1600

Registration

To register for the course, please fill in the form found via this link.

Note that the number of places is limited and will be allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis. Your registration will be confirmed within 3 weeks.

If you have any questions regarding the course, feel free to send an e-mail to statistics@lumc.nl, stating ‘ASA’ in the subject line.