Application of random survival forest to establish a nomogram combining clinlabomics-score and clinical data for predicting brain metastasis in primary lung cancer

To establish a nomogram for predicting brain metastasis (BM) in primary lung cancer at 12, 18, and 24 months after initial diagnosis.

In this study, we included 428 patients who were diagnosed with primary lung cancer at Harbin Medical University Cancer Hospital between January 2020 and January 2022. The endpoint event was BM. The patients were randomly categorized into two groups in a 7:3 ratio: training (n = 299) and validation (n = 129) sets. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator was utilized to analyze the laboratory test results in the training set. Furthermore, clinlabomics-score was determined using regression coefficients. Then, clinlabomics-score was combined with clinical data to construct a nomogram using random survival forest (RSF) and Cox multivariate regression. Then, various methods were used to evaluate the performance of the nomogram.

Five independent predictive factors (pathological type, diameter, lymph node metastasis, non-lymph node metastasis and clinlabomics-score) were used to construct the nomogram. In the validation set, the bootstrap C-index was 0.7672 (95% CI 0.7092–0.8037), 12-month AUC was 0.787 (95% CI 0.708–0.865), 18-month AUC was 0.809 (95% CI 0.735–0.884), and 24-month AUC was 0.858 (95% CI 0.792–0.924). In addition, the calibration curve, decision curve analysis and Kaplan–Meier curves revealed a good performance of the nomogram.

Finally, we constructed and validated a nomogram to predict BM risk in primary lung cancer. Our nomogram can identify patients at high risk of BM and provide a reference for clinical decision-making at different disease time points.