Analysis of prognostic factors for survival after surgery for gallbladder cancer based on a Bayesian network

The factors underlying prognosis for gallbladder cancer (GBC) remain unclear. This study combines the Bayesian network (BN) with importance measures to identify the key factors that influence GBC patient survival time. A dataset of 366 patients who underwent surgical treatment for GBC was employed to establish and test a BN model using BayesiaLab software. A tree-augmented naïve Bayes method was also used to mine relationships between factors. Composite importance measures were applied to rank the influence of factors on survival time. The accuracy of BN model was 81.15%. For patients with long survival time (>6 months), the true-positive rate of the model was 77.78% and the false-positive rate was 15.25%. According to the built BN model, the sex, age, and pathological type were independent factors for survival of GBC patients. The N stage, liver infiltration, T stage, M stage, and surgical type were dependent variables for survival time prediction. Surgical type and TNM stages were identified as the most significant factors for the prognosis of GBC based on the analysis results of importance measures.