Patients with same or close values of SCIO may be included in study groups for clinical trials. The comparison groups may be built in same SCIO range as for treatrment indications, e.g. 9-12 or 12-16 when studying systemic therapy.
At now we don't recommend conducting comparative trials with SCIO lesser than 3 or greater than 20, at least for systemic therapy.

Several studies that were conducted with SCIO use included even less strict criteria, simply giving SCIO range and average SCIO for groups with no initial stratification.