Chomentowski, M., Kellerer, A. M. and Pierce, D. A. Radiation Dose Dependences in the Atomic Bomb Survivor Cancer Mortality Data: A Model-Free Visualization.

The standard approach to obtaining nominal risk coefficients for radiation-related cancer involves fitting linear or linear-quadratic dose–response functions. This is usually complemented by a more direct visualization where the data are subdivided into distinct dose categories and the effect level is quantified for each of these categories. Such model-free computations, however, can be quite dependent on the arbitrary choice of the cutpoints in dose. The method proposed here largely avoids this arbitrariness by choosing a dose category width—constant on a log scale—to obtain the desired degree of smoothing, and then superimposing results for all placements of the resulting log-dose grids. The method is applied to leukemia and solid cancer mortality of the A-bomb survivors.