Online Help is available (click on Help in the web tool, or open http://analysistools.nci.nih.gov/apc/help.html). Input data for the web tool consist of age-specific numbers of events and person-years over time, in the form of a rate matrix of paired columns. Three sample datasets that describe prostate (43 (link)), lung (29 ), and breast cancer (32 ) mortality are linked to the web tool (click on Help, then Sample Data, or open http://analysistools.nci.nih.gov/apc/help.html#example). The input page is shown in Figure 1 for the prostate cancer mortality data (example 1). In general, user data can be input by copy-and-paste from an Excel worksheet or file upload of a comma-separated-values (csv) file. As shown in Figure 1, age groups correspond to rows and calendar periods to columns. The rates are defined by adjacent pairs of columns: the first column of each pair lists the numbers of events by age for a given calendar period, and the second column lists the corresponding persons-years. The age and period intervals must all be equal (44 (link)), i.e. if 5-year age groups are used then 5-year calendar periods must also be used. The intervals can range from 1 through 10 years inclusive. Data in this format can easily be obtained from publicly-available data resources with cancer case and population data, such as the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program of the National Cancer Institute (http://www.seer.cancer.gov) and Cancer Incidence in Five Continents (CI5) of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (http://ci5.iarc.fr).
The web tool fits the APC model and calculates parameters and estimable functions summarized in Table 1. On the web site, each function is presented in its own tab in graphical and tabular format, as illustrated in Figure 2. A number of key hypothesis tests are also provided in the ‘Wald Tests’ tab located in the sidebar on the left-hand side of the web page. These hypothesis tests are summarized in Table 2.