Basic clinical trials

Concepts

Clinical trials are research studies conducted to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of medical treatments, interventions, drugs, devices, or therapies in humans. These trials are a crucial step in the process of developing and improving medical treatments and ensuring they meet rigorous scientific and ethical standards before they are widely available for clinical use.

Simulators

Two-group design with binary output

A very basic design is one that considers two groups (usually control and treatment) and evaluates a binary outcome (e.g. improvement/no improvement). In this application you can explore the different aspects of this design and, in particular, the implications of the type of hypothesis to be evaluated (equivalence, superiority, non-inferiority, etc.).

Estimation of treatment's effect: the importnce of a control group

Non-specific effects can mask the actual effect of a treatment. In this application, this situation can be studied to highlight the importance of having an adequate design that can evaluate the effect of a treatment in the presence of potential non-specific effects.

Multi-arm clinical trial with normal distributed response

In a multi-arm clinical trial designed as a completely randomized design (CRD), the primary goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of multiple treatments or interventions for a specific medical condition while ensuring that the assignment of participants to different treatment arms is done randomly and without any systematic bias. Here's how a multi-arm clinical trial with a completely randomized design works: