Therapeutic Schedule Evaluation for Brain-Metastasized Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer with A Probabilistic Linguistic ELECTRE II Method

With the rapid development of modern medicine, therapeutic schedules of brain-metastasized non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are expanding. To assist a patient who suffers from brain-metastasized NSCLC to select the most suitable therapeutic schedule, firstly, we establish an indicator system for evaluating the therapeutic schedules; then, we propose a probabilistic linguistic ELECTRE II method to handle the corresponding evaluation problem for the following reasons: (1) probabilistic linguistic information is effective to depict the uncertainty of the therapeutic process and the fuzziness of an expert's cognition; (2) the ELECTRE II method can deal with evaluation indicators that do not meet a fully compensatory relationship. Simulation tests on the parameters in the proposed method are provided to discuss their impacts on the final rankings. Furthermore, we apply the proposed method to help a patient with brain-metastasized NSCLC at the Sichuan Cancer Hospital and Institute to choose the optimal therapeutic schedule, and we present some sensitive analyses and comparative analyses to demonstrate the stability and applicability of the proposed method.