Bayesian gamma frailty models for survival data with semi-competing risks and treatment switching.

Motivated from a colorectal cancer study, we propose a class of frailty semi-competing risks survival models to account for the dependence between disease progression time, survival time, and treatment switching. Properties of the proposed models are examined and an efficient Gibbs sampling algorithm using the collapsed Gibbs technique is developed. A Bayesian procedure for assessing the treatment effect is also proposed. The deviance information criterion (DIC) with an appropriate deviance function and Logarithm of the pseudomarginal likelihood (LPML) are constructed for model comparison. A simulation study is conducted to examine the empirical performance of DIC and LPML and as well as the posterior estimates. The proposed method is further applied to analyze data from a colorectal cancer study.