This month's MHRI-GHUCCTS Monthly Statistical Seminar Series will be held Friday, October 18, 2024, from 12 PM - 1 PM. This series features Dr. Paul Kolm, Associate Director in the Center for Biostatistics, Informatics, & Data Science (CBIDS) at MedStar Health Research Institute.

The topic of this month's seminar will be analysis of how clinical trials, randomized or not, often require recruiting participants over several years as well as requiring substantial resources for conducting the trial and obtaining data – in other words, a trial can be very expensive to conduct. In order to minimize unnecessary time and expense, interim analyses are often included in the trial to assess whether the trial should be stopped before the projected time, either for futility (small chance of a positive outcome) or success at the interim analysis. We will primarily look at different statistical methods for controlling the Type I error rate over the study, when the interim analyses should be conducted and whether there needs to be more than one interim analysis.