Copy and paste the above line of code into your sas session and run it three times if your session gets
stuck in that you submit things and see it echoed in the log but it does not
do anything. If you see the ">>> NOW WORKING" message starting at column
one in the log then your session just came back to life again (hopefully).
%aetab available
A clinical reporting macro has been added to Spectre that can do multi-level AE
reporting beyond the current three-level reporting limit of %npcttab. Note that there
is a current limitation in that only Western character sets will be correctly aligned
with this macro. The same applies to the style=3 reporting for %npcttab. This is
because it uses the utility macro %splitvar to do the alignment and this assumes
one letter takes up one byte. This is not the case for many Asian character sets.
%aetab
Clinical Reporting macros must be licensed for commercial use
Because the SAS Learning Edition is no longer available I have to ask for a licence fee for
using the Clinical reporting macros for real analysis purposes. The time I have put into
writing the entire Spectre system stands at about 2500 hours of which 250 hours was maintenance
and development of just the Clinical reporting macros for the year 2011. I have other hobby
projects that take up a lot of my time that I prefer to work on so I can only continue to
maintain and enhance the Clinical reporting macros if it is done on a commercial basis.
Therefore, from 2012, I must charge for the commercial use
of the Clinical Reporting macros that you can download from this web site. I have set the yearly
licence fee at 10% of the individual SAS licence fee renewal per programmer (see download page
for definitive details). For Europe, the renewal SAS licence is about €2000 per year and for
China about €1110 per year so the licence for the macros will be 10% of the regional individual
renewal price per year (applicable sales tax to be added). Block discounts are available to
large organisations (the minimum block size is 50) and only block discount customers will get
development support (see download page).
The utility macros and system macros will continue to be free to all users and if you are just
studying the Clinical Reporting macros or using them purely for purposes other than
relevant reporting or relevant QC work of clinical or other data then there is no licence required.
If you are evaluating the suitability of these macros then you are permitted to use them for real
analysis purposes on two studies (or one very large study) without a licence but you must ask for
and be granted permission for this from me.
The conditions and licence fee is now clearly stated on the download page. The download page
is the only valid source of information on the conditions for using the clinical reporting macros.
Information on conditions and licencing that you might find on other pages on this web site that
contradict the download page should be ignored as this is old information that I haven't gotten
around to removing yet.
Old-time SAS programmers will be familiar with the macros %left, %lowcase and %trim.
These have been supplied with the sasautos library distributed with copies
of SAS for many years. They behave like macro functions and yet they are
macros. They have now been made redundant, because %sysfunc calls can replace
them, but %left and %trim have been used by programmers for years not knowing
or caring whether they are macro language functions or macros. You use
them in the same way. There is no rationale as to why some of these macros
are there and some not. You might be familiar with the %words macro that
you can find on the SAS Technical Support site. That has never been a member
of the supplied sasautos library and yet it is obviously a useful macro
that deserves a place in the autocall library. The point is,
it is up to you to decide what utility macros you want to make available
and to create those that you need.
Obvious candidates for adding to the sasautos library are the very useful
function calls used in SCL for extracting variable and data set information.
In SCL you need to open the data set and give it a file handle before you
can get this information but it is easy enough to write this code into
a macro in a way that the whole macro behaves like a macro function. I
have used this technique for many of the sasautos extension macros. This
is not at all efficient when you are making many of these calls, because
the data sets are being opened and closed multiple times when once would
have been better, but when you are developing more complex macros, such
as I have done for some clinical reporting macros, then the convenience
outweighs the efficiency considerations.
Modern software development is usually done using components so that
reliable applications can be built more quickly using smaller programming
teams. This is the best way to understand why I have built up a large collection of
low-level, general-purpose utility macros. I think with them and use them to
build sas applications. I have over 200 of these webbed here and I use them frequently
in my work. If you ever think of a low level utility
macro you need then there is a 95% chance or higher that it is already in my macro
collection and so it might save you time to check there first. To see these macros in
alphabetical order plus their purposes then use the link below. Not all sas
programmers will need these or even see the need for them but if you are developing
sas applications then you might find they are ideal for your purposes and can save
you a great deal of time and can put the development of complex applications
within the scope of individual sas programmers.
From time to time I get asked why I don't distribute my macros under an
"Open Source" license. This sounds like a good idea except that the idea
of "Open Source" encourages software to be improved upon. Again, this sounds
like a good idea but the trouble with my macros is that they are tightly
interlinked. The more complex macros rely on lower level macros and if
the functionality or calling convention of these lower-level macros changes
then the more complex macros might encounter errors or it might change their
functionality. This has to be avoided so any changes to them are only safely
made by myself, since I know all their dependencies. So instead of "Open Source"
they are public domain software (this does not apply to the major clinical
reporting macros) and this suits many of the smaller utility macros since they are
just commonly-used code (i.e. already "public domain" knowledge) encapsulated
into a macro and as such are not Copyrighted by myself partly because they
are not substantial pieces of work and partly because key elements of the code they
use was not developed by myself. And if I am not claiming Copyright then I do not
have the right to assign them over to an "Open Source" licensing system.
But as for using these macros, you are free to use them as if they were Open Source.
Use them freely but I advise against amending them for the reason stated.
Are there bugs in these macros?
Almost certainly. All complex software has bugs in it no matter
who tells you otherwise. And if not bugs, changes are required, sometimes,
for the software to be more useful or understandable. You will see from
the "Bugs and changes log" page below that there have been many bug fixes
and changes made to these macros. More bugs will be found in the future
and more changes made. I don't feel I am a bad programmer because of this.
It is normal for this sort of thing. For those who used to work on IBM
mainframes, even the program IEFBR14 had bugs in it or at least
had to be amended more than once to get it to work properly. And what did
IEFBR14 do, you might wonder? I will tell you -- it did nothing.
It was a null program that would instantly return control to the calling
program by using the instruction "BR 14" which means "Branch to the address
in register 14" so the only instruction it originally contained was one
to exit the program. Even that went wrong so don't expect my macros to
be entirely bug free as, collectively, they are about a million times more
complicated. Because of this, if you intend to use these macros in a production
environment, especially the more complex macros, then it is only wise to
do so if they are covered by some sort of support contract.
Having said that, it is very rare I have found a bug in one of the simple
low-level macros. The bugs are nearly always in the major Clinical reporting macros
but I am giving no promises. To give you an idea of how reliable the macros
are, please read the "Bugs and changes log" that you can link to in the
"Spectre (Clinical)" section near the end where you can see what work I
have done on these macros over the past six years and more.
How to use the macros
All the macros you can download here are intended to be put in a library
and included on the sasautos path. The major macros often call lower-level
macros so these will only work correctly if all these macros
are made available and declared to the sasautos path. I sometimes get asked
by email why the major macros don't work and why it is complicated by them
calling other macros but this is the whole point of this web site and the
approach it takes. It is all to do with the "sasautos extensions" idea
that I advocate and by that I mean building your own library full of all
the utility macros you will ever need and putting them on the sasautos
path. If you do this right then all the macros will work correctly and
you should be far more productive in your work.
What's BAD about these macros?
The biggest complaint I get about my macros are that most are not stand-alone.
They call other macros. I have to design my macros this way to remove code
duplication. I place the commonly used routines in small macros where I can
maintain the code in one place.
I use the sasautos
approach in that all the utility macros I need are in one library and this
library gets declared to the sasautos= system option. In other words, it
is a second autocall library. You received one of these autocall libraries
from the SAS Institute with your copy of SAS and now I am giving you a
second library which you are supposed to put on the sasautos path in front
of SASAUTOS. If you are working on your own PC or in your own work area
then this is easy enough. The trouble comes when you use my macros to create
a solution that other people are supposed to use. You then have to install
my sasautos library somewhere centrally where all the users can access
them. Here it gets more difficult as most sites will not want to see all
these macros appear - especially in their production area and especially
because none of my macros have been formally validated. However, what might
be acceptable, is a minimum set of these macros that are needed to implement
a needed solution. How to identify a minimum set of macros and copy just
those macros across to a library is explained on the page you can link
to below.
The patient profiler described in the article is similar in parts to
the PPD Patient Profiles.
PPD
Patient Profiles
I wrote an entirely independent version of a graphical patient
profiler. I consider it to be a very important enhancement to
the clinical trials process. Clinicians, who follow the progress of clinical
trials, will know about the serious adverse events and the successes. They
will probably find this out via telephone calls or faxes because the data
from the clinical trial will be "unclean". Indeed, I have had access to
this unclean data from many clinical trials and it is truly unclean, even
with wrong years for events. It takes months to sort out the irregularities.
But there is a lot of useful data in there that could be used for the benefit
of patient safety. If the clinician had access to the data and could visualise
the situation, they could, perhaps, spot danger-signals for patients on
the trial, based on the profile of patients who have already withdrawn
from the trial or patients who had suffered drug-related adverse events.
If the data were clean enough to use, and the patient profiling software
were good enough and flexible enough, then perhaps potential problems could
be spotted in advance, much to the benefit of patient safety.
As a sas programmer working on Linux/Unix, you may think you do not need
to learn Unix beyond knowing how to use some of the common commands. This
is largely true but if you work in a high-production environment, such
as clinical trials reporting, then having a good knowledge of Unix commands
and being able to write shell scripts can increase your productivity so learning
more about it becomes worthwhile. To help you in this, I have written several pages
to do with Unix and using it with SAS software.
If you have never written shell scripts before and your knowledge of
Unix is limited then you are better off using this link.
If you already have a shell script library you use and you want to hunt
for more useful tips and shell scripts then go direct to this page.
Spectre (Clinical)
Spectre (Clinical) is a clinical reporting system I wrote from late 2003
onwards. It is a full and complete clinical reporting system with shell
scripts, sas macros and extensive documentation. Its SAS macros are the
same ones you can download from this web site so you will not find any
more macros there. You can link to it below.
Spectre
(Clinical)
You can download Spectre using the link at the end of this section.
What follows is the current status of Spectre that you can download.
Bugs
and changes log spectre.zip (documentation) - 05 May 2013 clinmacros.zip (macros) - 13 Jun 2013 utilmacros.zip (macros) - 14 Jun 2013 sysmacros.zip (macros) - 08 May 2011 scripts.zip (scripts) - 23 Mar 2011
Spectre (Clinical) can be downloaded from the following page.
Spectre download
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