Enoch Yi-Tung Chen awarded prize for best student paper in medical statistics from the Swedish Society for Medical Statistics
Enoch Yi-Tung Chen has been awarded the Swedish Society for Medical Statistics (Föreningen för Medicinsk Statistik, FMS) prize for best student project in the area of medical statistics during 2020. The prize, which includes an award of 5000 SEK, was announced at the FMS annual general meeting on 25 March 2021.
The competition is open to undergraduate and master’s students in all programs at all Swedish higher education institutions and was introduced to draw attention to the importance of medical statistics, and to promote interest among students and doctoral students.
Enoch was awarded the prize for his degree project “Extrapolating cancer patient survival: a comparison of the flexible parametric model and the rolling-over algorithm” that he completed under the supervision of Professor Paul Dickman at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB), Karolinska Institutet, and Professor Jung-Der Wang at National Cheng Kung University as part of his studies in the KI Master’s Programme in Public Health Sciences.
The committee states that they are very happy to give the 2021 award to Enoch Yi-Tung Chen.The motivation continues; “The author presents two methods, the flexible parametric model (FPM) and the rolling-over algorithm (ROA), for estimating survival functions. Both methods have previously been used to extrapolate patients’ survival over the observed time but also applied for estimation of the loss of life expectancy due to cancer. In Chen’s master thesis the two approaches are also applied and compared to the Kaplan Meier estimates for studies of patients with colon cancer and breast cancer.
Chen gives a simple but precise presentation of the statistical theoretical concepts and definitions related to the problem under study within survival analysis. He presents motivating data sets, two cohorts of colon cancer patients and two cohorts of breast cancer patients, together with a comparative investigation of the FPM and ROA. Chen has carried out his task in a commendable way and his thesis can serve as an excellent example of a comparative study of statistical estimation approaches with a motivating empirical example for statistics in medicine. “
Enoch was recently admitted to doctoral studies at MEB to further study “Extrapolating survival with applications in health technology assessment” under the supervision of Paul Dickman, Mark Clements, and Magnus Björkholm.