escalation: A Modular Approach to Dose-Finding Clinical Trials

Methods for working with dose-finding clinical trials. We provide implementations of many dose-finding clinical trial designs, including the continual reassessment method (CRM) by O'Quigley et al. (1990) <doi:10.2307/2531628>, the toxicity probability interval (TPI) design by Ji et al. (2007) <doi:10.1177/1740774507079442>, the modified TPI (mTPI) design by Ji et al. (2010) <doi:10.1177/1740774510382799>, the Bayesian optimal interval design (BOIN) by Liu & Yuan (2015) <doi:10.1111/rssc.12089>, EffTox by Thall & Cook (2004) <doi:10.1111/j.0006-341X.2004.00218.x>; the design of Wages & Tait (2015) <doi:10.1080/10543406.2014.920873>, and the 3+3 described by Korn et al. (1994) <doi:10.1002/sim.4780131802>. All designs are implemented with a common interface. We also offer optional additional classes to tailor the behaviour of all designs, including avoiding skipping doses, stopping after n patients have been treated at the recommended dose, stopping when a toxicity condition is met, or demanding that n patients are treated before stopping is allowed. By daisy-chaining together these classes using the pipe operator from 'magrittr', it is simple to tailor the behaviour of a dose-finding design so it behaves how the trialist wants. Having provided a flexible interface for specifying designs, we then provide functions to run simulations and calculate dose-paths for future cohorts of patients.

Version: 0.2.3
Depends: magrittr
Imports: dplyr, tidyr (≥ 1.0), tidyselect, stringr, purrr, tibble, ggplot2, gtools, dfcrm, BOIN, trialr (≥ 0.1.5), DiagrammeR, RColorBrewer, viridis, binom, R6, mvtnorm, graphics, Iso, testthat
Suggests: knitr, rmarkdown, covr
Published: 2025-10-08
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.escalation
Author: Kristian Brock ORCID iD [aut, cre], Daniel Slade ORCID iD [aut], Michael Sweeting ORCID iD [aut], Conor Norris ORCID iD [ctb], Bharat Bhushan ORCID iD [ctb]
Maintainer: Kristian Brock <kristian.brock at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/brockk/escalation/issues
License: GPL (≥ 3)
URL: https://brockk.github.io/escalation/, https://github.com/brockk/escalation
NeedsCompilation: no
Materials: README, NEWS
In views: ClinicalTrials
CRAN checks: escalation results

Documentation:

Reference manual: escalation.html , escalation.pdf
Vignettes: Using escalation (source, R code)
CRM - Continual Reassessment Method (source, R code)
NBG - Neuenschwander, Branson & Gsponer (source, R code)
TPI - Toxicity Probability Interval Design (source, R code)
mTPI - Modified Toxicity Probability Interval Design (source, R code)
BOIN - Bayesian Optimal Interval Design (source, R code)
TITE-CRM and TITE-NBG - Time-to-Event Designs (source, R code)
EffTox, Wages & Tait, and BOIN12 - Efficacy & Toxicity Designs (source, R code)
BOIN-COMB - Treatment Combination Designs (source, R code)
Working with dose-paths (source, R code)
Simulating dose-escalation trials (source, R code)
Comparing dose-escalation designs by simulation (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: escalation_0.2.3.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: escalation_0.2.3.zip, r-release: escalation_0.2.3.zip, r-oldrel: escalation_0.2.3.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): escalation_0.2.3.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): escalation_0.2.3.tgz, r-release (x86_64): escalation_0.2.3.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): escalation_0.2.3.tgz
Old sources: escalation archive

Linking:

Please use the canonical form https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=escalation to link to this page.