Prognostic factors and survival prediction in hepatocellular carcinoma: development and validation of a novel...

Current staging systems for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) still have limitations in clinical practice. Our study aimed to explore the prognostic factors and develop a new nomogram to predict the cancer-specific survival (CSS) for patients with HCC.

A total of 6,166 HCC patients were identified from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Patients were randomly grouped into the training cohort (70%) and validation cohort (30%). Multivariate Cox analysis was used to identify prognostics factors for CSS of patients, then we incorporated these variables and presented a new nomogram to predict 2- and 5-year CSS. The performance of the nomogram was assessed with respect to its calibration, concordance index (C-index), area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC), and decision curve analysis (DCA).

Multivariate Cox analysis revealed that American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage, race, grade, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, tumor size, bone metastasis (BM), and alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) were independently associated with CSS. The prediction nomogram which contained these predictors showed good performance, with a C-index of 0.802 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.792-0.812] in the training cohort and 0.801 (95% CI, 0.787-0.815) in the validation cohort. The calibration curves demonstrated good agreement between the actual observation and the nomogram prediction. Furthermore, the nomogram showed improved discriminative capacity (AUC, 0.873 and 0.875 for 2- and 5-year CSS in validation set) compared to the 7^th tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) staging system (AUC, 0.735 and 0.717). The DCA also indicated good application of the nomogram.

This study presents a novel nomogram that incorporates the important prognostic factors of HCC, which can be conveniently used to accurately predict the 2- and 5-year CSS of patients with HCC, thus assisting individualized clinical decision making.