Multi-arm covariate adjusted response adaptive designs for ordinal outcome clinical trials.

Abstract

Covariate adjusted response adaptive designs are developed with ordinal categorical responses for phase III clinical trial involving multiple treatments. Stochastic ordering principle is used to order the treatments according to effectiveness and consequently allocation functions are developed by combining the cumulative odds ratios suitably. The performance of the proposed designs is investigated through relevant exact as well as large sample measures. To investigate the performance in a real situation, a real clinical trial involving lung cancer patients is further redesigned using the proposed allocation design.