Two-armed response-adaptive clinical trials are modelled as Markov decision problems to pursue two overriding objectives: Firstly, to identify the superior treatment at the end of the trial and, secondly, to keep the number of patients receiving the inferior treatment small. Such clinical trial designs are very important, especially for rare diseases. Thomas Ondra presents the main solution techniques for Markov decision problems and provides a detailed description how to obtain optimal allocation sequences.
"It is a remarkably concise exposition of the use of MDPs in a pharmaceutical setting; as such, the book's audience is the intersection of researchers and students with a sophisticated mathematical background and professionals in the pharmaceutical industry. ... the book is a very sophisticated treatise on MDP models for managing response-adaptive clinical trials and both mathematicians and pharmaceutical professionals would appreciate it." (James Smith, Interfaces, Vol. 45 (4), July-August, 2015)