The 6th International Conference on Econometrics and Statistics (EcoSta 2023), organized by Waseda University in Tokyo, was held from August 1st to 3rd, where world-renowned researchers presented their advances in the broad areas of econometrics and statistics.

Ricardo Cao, a member of the CITIC management committee, gave a presentation on his research, in collaboration with CITIC researchers Ana López Cheda and Beatriz Piñeiro Lamas, entitled “Single-index mixture-type cure models: an application to a study of cardiotoxicity in breast cancer patients”.

The research focuses on the study of the time to cardiotoxicity in HER2-positive patients treated with trastuzumab for breast cancer. This treatment can produce a problem in the heart (called cardiotoxicity), although it does not occur in all cases.

Therefore, to study the time until cardiotoxicity appears, mixture-type cure models are appropriate. These models allow estimation of both the probability of cure and the survival function of the uncured population, as a function of some clinical covariates and those from echocardiogram Doppler images. The BC-Cardiotox database, developed by researchers at CITIC and the cardiology service of the Complejo Hospital Universitario de A Coruña (CHUAC), allows selection of the relevant variables to determine the probability of cure and survival, as well as estimation of the statistical model that allows calculation of these probabilities.