Combining lymph node ratio to develop prognostic models for postoperative gastric neuroendocrine neoplasm patients

Background: Lymph node ratio (LNR) was demonstrated to play a crucial role in the prognosis of many tumors. However, research concerning the prognostic value of LNR in postoperative gastric neuroendocrine neoplasm (NEN) patients was limited.

Aim: To explore the prognostic value of LNR in postoperative gastric NEN patients and to combine LNR to develop prognostic models.

Methods: A total of 286 patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database were divided into the training set and validation set at a ratio of 8:2. 92 patients from the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University in China were designated as a test set. Cox regression analysis was used to explore the relationship between LNR and disease-specific survival (DSS) of gastric NEN patients. Random survival forest (RSF) algorithm and Cox proportional hazards (CoxPH) analysis were applied to develop models to predict DSS respectively, and compared with the 8^th edition American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) staging.

Results: Multivariate analyses indicated that LNR was an independent prognostic factor for postoperative gastric NEN patients and a higher LNR was accompanied by a higher risk of death. The RSF model exhibited the best performance in predicting DSS, with the C-index in the test set being 0.769 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.691-0.846] outperforming the CoxPH model (0.744, 95%CI: 0.665-0.822) and the 8^th edition AJCC TNM staging (0.723, 95%CI: 0.613-0.833). The calibration curves and decision curve analysis (DCA) demonstrated the RSF model had good calibration and clinical benefits. Furthermore, the RSF model could perform risk stratification and individual prognosis prediction effectively.

Conclusion: A higher LNR indicated a lower DSS in postoperative gastric NEN patients. The RSF model outperformed the CoxPH model and the 8^th edition AJCC TNM staging in the test set, showing potential in clinical practice.