Evaluation and Optimization of Screening Strategies for Cancers with Age-Specific Incidence Rates^*

Cancer remains a major threat to human health, and early screening is crucial for its prevention and management. To enhance the efficiency of screening programs, it is essential to evaluate and optimize screening strategies. This paper focuses on cancers characterized by age-specific incidence rates and develops a stochastic model to evaluate the benefit of various screening strategies. The model calculates the expected benefit that a screened population can gain from any given screening schedule, quantified in quality-adjusted life years. Applying this approach, we assess a range of rule-based screening strategies for central nervous system cancer and identify the dominant strategies on the Pareto frontier, which achieve a balance between fewer screenings and greater benefit. Sensitivity analysis results demonstrate that the findings exhibit a certain level of robustness to parameter fluctuations.