Nomogram for Predicting Overall Survival in Acral Lentiginous Melanoma: A Population‐based Study

BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to establish a nomogram for predicting the overall survival (OS) of patients with acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study sample was selected from 1785 patients diagnosed with ALM from 2004 to 2015 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, and R software was used to divide patients into the training cohort and validation cohort at a ratio of 7: 3. Stepwise selection method in the Cox regression model was used in the training cohort to select predictive variables to construct the nomogram, and model validation parameters were used in the validation cohort to evaluate the performance of the nomogram. RESULTS: The nomogram showed that age at diagnosis had the greatest impact on OS in patients with ALM, followed by AJCC stage, surgical treatment, SEER stage, sex, race, and marital status. The index of concordance, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, calibration plots, net reclassification improvement, integrated discrimination improvement, and decision curve analysis demonstrate the good performance of this nomogram. CONCLUSION: The prognostic value of the nomogram is superior to that of the AJCC staging system alone, and it helps clinicians to better predict 3-, 5-, and 8-year OS in patients with ALM.