Estimating the tumour onset distribution in animal carcinogenesis experiments

Abstract

In most survival-sacrifice experiments for the detection and quantification of risks from chronic exposure to chemical agents, the onset of the condition of interest is not clinically observable. Cancer is typically such an event. In this paper, an approximate maximum likelihood method is proposed for parametric estimation of the distribution of unobservable tumour onset times in the presence of competing risks, when cause-of-death information is unavailable.