Background: The influential factors of chemotherapy-induced myelosuppression in esophageal cancer in central China are unclear. This study aimed to develop a model for prediction of incidence of myelosuppression during chemotherapy among patients with esophageal cancer.
Methods: In this retrospective study, a total of 1446 patients with esophageal cancer who underwent five different chemotherapy regimens between 2013 and 2020 at our institute were randomly assigned in a 7:3 ratio to training and validation data sets. Clinical and drug-related variables were used to develop the prediction model from the training data set by the machine learning method of random forest. Finally, this model were tested in the validation data set.
Results: The prediction model were established with 16 indispensable variables selected from 46 variables. The model obtained an area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of .883 and accompanied by prediction accuracy of 80.0%, sensitivity of 77.8% and specificity of 81.8%.
Conclusion: This new prediction model showed excellent predictive ability of incidence of myelosuppression in turn providing preventative measures for patients with esophageal cancer during chemotherapy.
Keywords: chemotherapy; esophageal cancer; myelosuppression; prediction model; risk factors.