In this book chapter, we present a brief overview of the methods which are commonly used for statistical analysis of data in competing risks settings. Moreover, we review 37 recent published clinical papers on breast cancer which consider an event of interest, such as breast cancer incident, while they also take into account the competing events, such as death due to other causes. The papers are selected based on the number of citations and publication year.

For decades, reliability engineering techniques have been successfully applied in many industries to improve the performance of equipment maintenance management. Numerous inspection and optimization models are developed and widely used to achieve maintenance excellence, i.e. the balance of performance, risk, resources and cost to reach to an optimal solution. However, the application of all these techniques and models to medical devices is new. Hospitals, due to possessing a large number of difference devices, can benefit significantly if the optimization techniques are used properly in the equipment management processes. Most research in the area of reliability engineering for medical equipment mainly considers the devices in their design or manufacturing stage and suggests some techniques to improve the reliability. To this point, best maintenance strategies for medical equipment in their operating context have not been considered. We aim to address this gap and propose methods to improve current maintenance strategies in the healthcare industry.

This book chapter gives a brief background to the optimization of condition based maintenance (CBM) decisions, through proportional hazards modeling. It then shows how risk factors for breast cancer and its competing mortalities can be similar to condition monitoring variables and be used as predictors in a risk model.