Staburo presents two posters @ ISCB conference in Milan

The 44th Annual Conference of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics (ISCB) took place in Milan from the 27th to the 31st of August, and Staburo was there to be part of it. Four team members attended the conference, with two of them presenting posters.

The first poster “The role of quantitative EEG (QEEG) in clinical trials: A methodological review” was presented by Markus Waser, Senior Biostatistician at Staburo. It reviews the current role of quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) – which is defined as the numerical analysis of EEG signals in both time and frequency domain – in clinical trials. QEEG measures have shown potential as diagnostic biomarkers for neurological indications in observational studies, but there are no universal standards for QEEG application in interventional trials. The presented review results suggest three major current roles of QEEG in clinical trials: 1. Epileptic seizure detection, 2. Anesthesia monitoring during surgery, and 3. Efficacy assessment of interventions for neurological and mental and behavioral disorders. The majority of QEEG assessments is conducted using power spectral analysis.

The second poster, entitled “Deriving interpretable thresholds for Variable Importance in Random Forests by permutation”, was presented by Maria Blanco, Working Student in Biostatistics and Data Science. This research project is a collaborative work involving Maria, Staburo employees Tim Müller, Laura Schlieker and Hannes Buchner, as well as Armin Ott from Roche Diagnostics, and Roman Hornung from the Institute for Medical Information Processing, Biometry and Epidemiology, University of Munich. The project focus on the Random Forest (RF) method, adept at addressing challenges in high-dimensional data analysis and offering accurate predictions. Given its strengths, RF emerges as a potent tool in biomarkers research and personalized medicine. The group has been working on a method to identify all relevant covariables in these predictions.

During the conference, attendees engaged in a variety of parallel talk sessions, courses, and mini symposia. Social events were also on the agenda, including a welcome reception at the Società Umanitaria di Milano and a dinner at the Villa Reale of Monza, a stunning historic palace just outside the city. For those new in biostatistics, the conference featured a student gathering and the Early Career Biostatisticians (ECB) day, complete with several talks.

The event was a rewarding experience for the Staburo team, and we are already looking forward to the next one!

Staburo @ CEN 2023 conference in Basel

Staburo GmbH Head of Biostatistics and Managing Director, Hannes Buchner, will present the research project “Deriving interpretable thresholds for Variable Importance in Random Forests by permutation” during the high-dimensional analysis session at the Central European Network (CEN) conference. This year, the conference is being held in Basel, Switzerland, and the presentation is scheduled for the 6th of September at 9:10 am. (More information about this session can be found here).

The CEN promotes the exchange of biometry knowledge in Central Europe. It’s led by the Austrian Swiss, German, and Polish branches of the International Biometric Society (IBS). The upcoming event, the CEN2023 Conference, will take place from 3-7 September at the University of Basel’s Biozentrum. For those interested in participating, online registration is still open and can be accessed here. For more detailed information about the conference, please visit www.cen2023.ch.

The presented project is a collaboration between Staburo employees Hannes Buchner, Laura Schlieker, Maria Blanco and Tim Müller, as well as Armin Ott from Roche Diagnostics and Roman Hornung from the Institute for Medical Information Processing, Biometry and Epidemiology, University of Munich. The project’s focus is on the Random Forest (RF) method, which is capable of handling challenges present in high-dimensional data analysis and delivers predictions with good accuracy. Given these capabilities, RF is a powerful tool in biomarkers research and personalized medicine. The research group has been working on a method to determine all relevant covariables in these predictions. The talk will introduce the established Boruta algorithm, explain the improvements the proposed method, and then compare the performance of both methods using real and simulated data sets.

We are looking forward to sharing our findings at the conference and warmly invite anyone curious to join and engage in the after-talk discussion!

Staburo Running & Walking Event 2023

Of course, our running and walking event could not be missing in our Staburo team event series this year either. It was already the third self-organized company run. End of July on a summer day with mixed weather forecast, around 30 colleagues of our team met at English garden for the annual run and walk event.

This year the route led past the lake house, the Chinese tower as well as the Japanese garden, where our runners covered a distance of 5 km and the walkers 2.5 km. After a short warm-up session, all participants dressed in their Staburo sports t-shirts met at the starting line near the Milchhäusl. Thus, the run and walk event – and for some also the competition – was on. The paths in the English garden offered enough space for all our athletes and various groups at different speeds were formed.

Just after everyone had arrived at the finish line, already the second thunderstorm for this day hit, and we hurried to our after-event location – the Atzinger in the university area. Due to the weather, we couldn’t sit in the beergarden, but nevertheless we ended this nice and active event evening with delicious food and drinks.

Thanks to everyone who joined our sporty and fun team event. It was a motivating and cheerful atmosphere throughout the evening, and we enjoyed being active together as a team at Staburo. The next team event is just around the corner by end of September – stay tuned!

Staburo is official network partner of CRS

Staburo has been working reliably and very well in data science projects with CRS – Clinical Research Services Management GmbH – for several years now.

In this context, it is an honour to announce that Staburo is one of CRS official network partners, together with Physiogenex and FGK, which are also shown on the CRS website.

CRS is an expert for early phase studies and a healthcare partner, which is highly committed to make a contribution in the development of new drugs that improve patients’ lives. Every year, they contribute to helping millions of people and bringing new medicines to market.

Over the years we built a close collaboration for projects in which data science support is needed. We are looking forward to continuing the great work and to more exciting data science projects in the future!

Staburo @ PSI conference 2023 in London

A couple of weeks ago, from 11th to 14th of June the PSI 2023 was held in Hammersmith, London. The conference is regarded as the principal annual event of the statisticians of the pharmaceutical industry and was therefore fully packed with amazing presentations and high-quality posters. Not only during the social events like the evening in the pub or the gala dinner, but also between sessions there were a lot of opportunities for networking, exchanging ideas and meeting like-minded colleagues.

The conference was also a great chance to meet the two co-chairs of the PSI Biomarker SIG Nicole Krämer (Boehringer Ingelheim) and Guillaume Desachy (Astra Zeneca) as well as many other members of the group.

The PSI Biomarker SIG organized an interactive session dedicated to biomarkers with “From basics to hot topics!” as its motto. The session was divided into three parts covering the three main interests of the SIG. Nicole Krämer represented the Machine Learning substream and talked about “Omics and digital biomarkers: two peas in a pod or two worlds colliding?”. Deepak Parashar (University of Warwick) gave insights into the biomarker-based designs with his presentation on “Trial Designs: Is there hope?”. The data repository substream was represented by Guillaume Desachy and his talk “Who said: a collection of biomarker datasets?”.

We are very happy to be part of the PSI Biomarker SIG and are already looking forward to the next group meetings.

And of course we are already looking forward to the PSI conference 2024 in Amsterdam.