Response assessment in patients with brain metastases

RANO Brain Metastases and RECIST are two different methods for measuring the size of cancer lesions. These methods are used in clinical trials to assess the tumor shrinkage or tumor growth that happens when patients are treated with a specific drug(s). Although both methods have some similar characteristics in the way they assess the size of the cancer, there are also some differences. It is unclear if one of the methods may be better correlated with the length of time that a patient responds to treatment, or whether one of the methods is better correlated with the total time a patient survives. RECIST and RANO are currently planning on pooling together data from a large number of clinical trials of brain metastases to compare RANO BM with RECIST.

Objectives

  1. To assess the correlation and level of agreement between RECIST and RANO-BM response categories. This refers to how often these methods coincide in what they measure.
  2. To compare the association of progression-free survival by RANO BM, with that of progression-free survival by RECIST. This refers to how each method correlates with the length of time a patient responds to treatment.
  3. To compare the strength of the association between PFS according to RANO BM and OS to that between PFS according to RECIST and OS. This refers to how each method correlates with the length of time a patient survives.