Simplified Models of Screening for Chronic Disease: Estimation Procedures from Mass Screening Programmes

Abstract

The performance of a screening program depends on a number of parameters, which may need different types of information for their estimation. Two characteristics of interest, the sojourn-time distribution and the sensitivity, are considered, and estimation procedures, based on data which should be available from a mass screening program, are proposed. The methods are applied to published data from a health insurance plan breast cancer screening project, to which a negative exponential distribution for the sojourn-time distribution fitted better than the other families of distribution considered.