Hello Everyone,
 
I’m a SAS user who has recently become interested in sequential clinical trials designs. I’ve discovered that the SAS based approaches for these designs are either too costly or are “experimental.” So now I’m looking for alternative software. Two programs that seem promising are SPLUS Seqtrial and R.
 
I recently obtained a 30 day trial for the SPLUS Seqtrial add-on and have worked my way through most of the examples in the manual. I’ve also gotten access to R, installed a package called gsDesign, and worked through most of the examples in its documentation. 
 
Although I don’t yet have a good understanding of the various approaches to sequential clinical trials designs, I thought that the gsDesign package seemed very impressive. I also understand that there are several other R packages that relate to sequential clinical trials designs, such as AGSDest , GroupSeq, ldbounds, MChtest, PwrGSD, and Seqmon. Some of these seem fairly comprehensive while others seem to focus on a single approach. 
 
My questions center on the adequacy of SPLUS Seqtrial and the R Packages. I was wondering if there is anyone out there who would be familiar enough with these to comment on their relative merits. Will SPLUS Seqtrial or the R packages allow me to do all the designs I’m ever likely to need? If I pay for SPLUS Seqtrial, will I get anything that I can’t get using the various R packages? Are any of the R packages comprehensive? Or would it at least be possible to cover all the types of designs that are commonly used by employing a variety of R packages? What kind of validation work generally goes into an R package and how would this likely compare to the sort of validation work that has gone into Seqtrial?
 
There may be other questions that I should be asking but haven’t thought of. 
 
At any rate, if some of you would be willing to share some advice or insights I’d greatly appreciate it.
 
Thanks,
 
Paul


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