The purpose of SURV-4 program package is to calculate relative survival rates and to perform certain statistical tests on these calculated statistics. For the theoretical background and terminology of these methods, refer to Ederer et al. (1961), Hakama and Hakulinen (1977), Hakulinen (1977), Hakulinen (1982), Hakulinen and Abeywickrama (1985), and Hakulinen et. al. (1987). The creation of data files to enable a regression analysis extension based on the GLIM statistical package (Hakulinen and Tenkanen 1987) is also included together with the GLIM macros.

This package was designed for mainframe computers at the Finnish Cancer Registry at the request of the Organization of European Cancer Institutes, and subsequently modified for micro-computers at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

The present version SURV-4 includes a friendly User’s Interface that helps the user in running the set of programs for calculate relative survival rates and to perform statistical tests on these calculated statistics.

• Ederer, F., Axtell, L.M. and Cutler, S.J. (1961): The relative survival rate: a statistical methodology. Natl. Cancer Inst. Monogr. 6:101-121.
• Hakama, M. and Hakulinen, T. (1977): Estimating the expectation of life in cancer survival studies with incomplete follow-up information. J. Chron. Dis. 30: 585-597.
• Hakulinen, T. (1977): On long-term relative survival rates, J. Chron. Dis. 30: 431443.
• Hakulinen, T. (1982): Cancer survival corrected for heterogeneity in patient withdrawal. Biometrics 38:933-942.
• Hakulinen, T. and Abeywickrama, K.H. (1985): A computer program package for relative survival analysis. Comp. Progr. Biomed. 19: 197-207.
• Hakulinen, T. and Tenkanen, L. (1987): Regression analysis of relative survival rates. Appl. Stat. 36: 309-317.
• Hakulinen, T., Tenkanen, L., Abeywickrama, K. and Päivärinta, L. (1987): Testing equality of relative survival patterns based on aggregated data. Biometrics 43: 313-325.