Discrete strategies of cancer post-treatment surveillance. Estimation and optimization problems.

We consider the cancer post-treatment surveillance to be represented by a discrete observation process with a non-zero false-negative rate. Using a simple stochastic model of cancer recurrence derived within the random minima framework, we obtain parametric estimates of both the time-to-recurrence distribution and the probability of false-negative diagnosis. Then assuming the false-negative rate known, we give a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator for the tumor latency time distribution.