This theme has a research programme that encompasses both applied health research and the development and evaluation of statistical methods. Current methodological topics include risk modelling of health outcomes, modelling clustered data, analysis of health economic data, meta-analysis, missing data, evidence synthesis and Bayesian methods.
Much of the applied research is carried in collaboration with health researchers within the UCLH/UCL Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre (CBRC) and the PRIMENT CTU. The NIHR grant for the CBRC has enabled the formation of a Biostatistics Group which sits across the UCL Statistics Department and the UCL faculty of Life and Biomedical Sciences. Applied research projects include developing the first risk model for heart valve surgery, developing a severity scoring system for multiple sclerosis, validating risk models for cardiac surgery, measuring variation in general practice outcomes, studying cost effectiveness of decisions on treatments for angina pectoris, and randomised trials in health services research and drug development.
|Rumana Omar||Reader (Theme Lead)|
|Gareth Ambler||Senior Lecturer|
|Ardo van den Hout||Lecturer|
|Maria De Iorio||Reader|
Heart valve surgery has an associated in-hospital mortality rate of 4% to 8%. This project developed a simple risk model to predict the risk of in-hospital mortality for patients undergoing heart valve surgery, to provide information to patients and clinicians and facilitate institutional comparisons.
Data on 16,679 patients, obtained from the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, were used to develop the risk model. Data on a further 16,160 patients were used to evaluate its performance.
Other Research Output
- Biostatistics theme publications
- R package to perform Bayesian Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
- Stata software
Biostatistics Web Lectures
The Biostatistics Group has recently created web lectures to provide an introduction to quantitative methods for health researchers and postgraduate students, and to provide a refresher or revision course for those researchers who have previously attended a module or short course. Funding for these lectures was provided by the Education Theme of the UCLH/UCL Biomedical Research Centre.
UCL Partners Biostatistics Network
The UCL Partners Biostatistics Network is a network of medical statisticians from various departments across UCL/H. It has been developed to improve communication between medical statisticians, and to help build a stronger presence of statisticians involved in medical research within these institutions.
The UCL/H Biostatistics network is open to all statisticians working in medical research at UCL/H. The webpage is currently hosted by Statistical Science.
Page last modified on 19 feb 15 17:12