Accurate prediction of HCC risk after SVR in patients with hepatitis C cirrhosis based on longitudinal data

Most existing predictive models of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk after sustained virologic response (SVR) are built on data collected at baseline and therefore have limited accuracy. The current study aimed to construct an accurate predictive model incorporating longitudinal data using a novel modeling strategy. The predictive performance of the longitudinal model was also compared with a baseline model.

A total of 400 patients with HCV-related cirrhosis who achieved SVR with direct-acting antivirals (DAA) were enrolled in the study. Patients were randomly divided into a training set (70%) and a validation set (30%). Informative features were extracted from the longitudinal variables and then put into the random survival forest (RSF) to develop the longitudinal model. A baseline model including the same variables was built for comparison.

During a median follow-up time of approximately 5 years, 25 patients (8.9%) in the training set and 11 patients (9.2%) in the validation set developed HCC. The areas under the receiver-operating characteristics curves (AUROC) for the longitudinal model were 0.9507 (0.8838-0.9997), 0.8767 (0.6972,0.9918), and 0.8307 (0.6941,0.9993) for 1-, 2- and 3-year risk prediction, respectively. The brier scores of the longitudinal model were also relatively low for the 1-, 2- and 3-year risk prediction (0.0283, 0.0561, and 0.0501, respectively). In contrast, the baseline model only achieved mediocre AUROCs of around 0.6 (0.6113, 0.6213, and 0.6480, respectively).

Our longitudinal model yielded accurate predictions of HCC risk in patients with HCV-relate cirrhosis, outperforming the baseline model. Our model can provide patients with valuable prognosis information and guide the intensity of surveillance in clinical practice.