ABSTRACT
Clinical trials are a class of experiments carried out as research in a clinical setting. This chapter seeks to provide some insight into how Bayesian ideas can be brought to bear on clinical trial design and analysis in order to improve the study. It first defines what we mean by “clinical trial.” The chapter reviews the different types of studies often considered as clinical trials and provides some Bayesian approaches to designing these studies. Clinical trials are essentially experiments evaluating different forms of therapy in a setting that is somewhat similar to the setting in which the therapy would be used. A strictly Bayesian approach to sample size determination would place the number of patients in the context of a decision problem.
