Once dominated or extended dominated strategies are excluded, the remaining strategies form the cost-effectiveness frontier, the efficient alternatives for which no alternative policy exists that result in better effects for lower costs.
In addition, for all investor profiles, the recommended strategy completely outperforms the market and the remaining strategies.
A similar complexity trend for the linear MMSE receiver illustrated in Fig. 3 shows a relatively lower complexity than the standard ML detector; however, its complexity still substantially exceeds that of the remaining strategies as a cubic cost is brought.
The remaining strategies are not dominated and are known as 'efficient'efficient
The liberal re-sort and flexible-protocol also captured 83% of abundant clusters, compared to the remaining strategies, which captured 66-72% of abundant clusters.
In contrast, as was observed with M, strategies based on STAR and RTC together with ML, MP, or NJ share similar numbers of clades among other such strategies as with the remaining strategies (mostly yellow boxes).
If there is sufficient budget to fund all the remaining strategies, the decision problem is solved, meaning that the multicriteria decision making process can be ended after the scoring phase.
Similarly to the behavior of MDC, strategies that are based on Concatenation, SMRT, and STEAC together with ML, MP, or NJ share more clades with other such strategies (mostly white and yellow boxes) than with the remaining strategies (mostly dark boxes).
The ICERs, interpreted as the additional cost required to achieve an increase of one QALY, were calculated for the remaining strategies by dividing the difference in the expected cost by the difference in the expected QALYs compared with the next least-expensive strategy.
Comparing the above mentioned costs and outcomes in incremental terms (ICER) with the no-treatment strategy, the STR appeared to be the most cost-effective therapeutic choice (€22,017), followed by TDF + 3TC + EFV (€24,526), TDF/FTC + nevirapine (€26,416), and TDF + FTC + EFV (€26,558); the remaining strategies have an ICER value varying from €28,000 to €41,000 per QALY.
