Personalized four-category staging for predicting prognosis in patients with small bowel Adenocarcinoma: an international development and validation study

Background: Log odds of positive lymph nodes (LODDS) classification showed superiority over 8th edition N staging in predicting survival of small bowel adenocarcinoma (SBA) patients. The aim of this study was to develop and validate the Tumor, LODDS, and Metastasis (TLM) staging of SBA. Methods: Totally 1789 SBA patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database between 1988–2010, 437 patients from SEER database between 2011–2013 and 166 patients from multicenters were categorized into development, validation and test cohort, respectively. The TLM staging was developed in the development cohort using Ensemble Algorithm for Clustering Cancer Data (EACCD) method. C-index was used to assess the performance of the TLM staging in predicting cancer-specific survival (CSS) and was compared with the traditional 8th edition TNM staging. Findings: Four-category TLM staging designed for the development cohort showed higher discriminatory power than TNM staging in predicting CSS in the development cohort (0.682 vs. 0.650, P