The BF provides statistical expertise in study design and data analysis for members of UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. Statisticians within the unit collaborate on developing protocols for clinical trials, and research proposals for laboratory-based investigations, epidemiologic studies, and clinical investigations. We perform statistical analyses for such studies, substantively interpret their results and author or co-author papers for publication. The BF is committed to developing statistical methodology that aids cancer research, and to applying statistical and computational methods to accomplish this.
Each biostatistician has a workstation equipped with the latest software for statistical analysis (SAS, R, S-Plus, StatXact, Stata, NCSS/PASS) and office productivity (LaTeX, Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, MathType, Reference Manager). Their workstations are linked through a firewall-protected local area network with local servers providing data backup, file sharing, and network printing services. One server supports legacy statistical applications, a web-enabled patient randomization service, and a shared web/ftp server. Finally, all workstations have a wide-area network connection that provides a connection to the internet and online access to resources of the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC.
Beginning in 2012, the BF also supports a legacy data system for raw data, analysis code, analysis results, graphics and reports associated with peer-reviewed publications.
The BF no longer supports the Java Bryant-Day clinical trial design tool. The function freq_binom_two_bryantday_twostage in the R package EurosarcBayes, available from CRAN, provides these designs.