Switching mechanism
DISEASE PROGRESSION, EVENT
It is assumed that patients could switch to experimental treatment in accordance with the protocol. The switching percentage were considered as 30%, 60% and 90%. The occurrence of switching for each patient in the standard treatment depended on the time of disease progression, which was generated as a proportion of survival times dictated by a random value between 0 and 1 taken from a beta distribution with alpha and beta parameters. The primary reason for generating disease progression times was to allow us to simulate switching time to be immediately after disease progression.After generating all of the variables mentioned above, the survival time for the switched patients in the standard treatment should be adjusted. If time spent in the standard treatment is denoted by TThe HR can be converted to the treatment effect by using the formula in Collett, i.e. Now, if the survival time is before the end of study, the patient will experience an event and the indicator variable of censoring takes the value k (k = 1, 2); it takes 0 and the patient is censored, otherwise.