Exact power computation for dose-response studies

The toxicity of an agent or the therapeutic effect of a drug may be assessed by a dose-response study. We present a method for computing the exact power of exact and large sample statistical tests employed for binary response data from such a study. This method, based on recursive polynomial multiplications, enables fast computation of exact power for studies with up to a moderately large sample size. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method using three examples. The method is suitable for the design and power analysis of dose-response studies in which the usual asymptotic approximations are suspect.