Modeling survival durations of patients undergoing aortic valve replacement

Abstract

Survival analysis is a useful statistical tool for problems that deal with survival data. This data is used in order to analyze the predicted duration for a certain event to occur. Initial survival analysis was linked explicitly with events related to death. However, this is no longer the case and nowadays survival analysis is used in almost all research areas to model duration of device failure or relapse duration to drug, smoking and alcohol addiction. This paper presents several approaches to model survival durations of patients undergoing aortic valve replacement. These survival models will be used to relate survival durations for censored data to several pre- and post-operative patient related variables to identify risks factors.