Cancer as a Markovian process: A probabilistic analysis of the curable phase Sharma Bandana1,*, Sarmah Pranita2 1Department of Statistics, Cotton College, Guwahati, India 2Department of Statistics, Gauhati University, Guwahati, India *Corresponding author: bsharmacotton@rediffmail.com
Online published on 2 July, 2012. Abstract Cancer as a disease is known to all but the behavior of it is yet to be known exactly. After diagnosis of cancer one can know about its stages and according to that treatment of a cancer patient is generally started. The main part of any cancer treatment is to prolong the advancement of cancer to further sites of human body and thus to increase the survival rate of the patient. In this paper, attempt was made to study the transitions behavior of a cancer patient from one stage of cancer to another through a Markov process. By considering all the possible stages of cancer patient a stochastic process was defined. The stages of cancer were divided into two phases viz. curable and incurable. As long as the patient remains in the curable phase the treatment given to the patient will be more effective. The paper primarily dealt with the conditions of the curable phase of cancer. In this paper, the different probabilities that the patient will visit the state 2 for the first time provided it was in state i initially (i = 0, 1) were calculated. The different waiting time distributions from one state to an advanced state were also calculated. The expected number of visits to the healthy state 0 from an unhealthy state i (i = 1, 2) as calculated in this paper will help in knowing about the effectiveness of the treatment given to a cancer patient. Top Keywords Stages of cancer, States of Stochastic process, Curable phase, Incurable phase, Markovian process. Top |