Individualized model for predicting pathological complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer: A multicenter study

BACKGROUND: Pathological complete response (pCR) is considered a surrogate for favorable survival in breast cancer (BC) patients treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT), which is the goal of NACT. This study aimed to develop and validate a nomogram for predicting the pCR probability of BC patients after NACT based on the clinicopathological features. METHODS: A retrospective analysis of 527 BC patients treated with NACT between January 2018 and December 2021 from two institutions was conducted. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to select the most useful predictors from the training cohort (n = 225), and then a nomogram model was developed. The performance of the nomogram was evaluated with respect to its discrimination, calibration, and clinical usefulness. Internal validation and external validation were performed in an independent validation cohort of 96 and 205 consecutive BC patients, respectively. RESULTS: Among the 18 clinicopathological features, five variables were selected to develop the prediction model, including age, American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) T stage, Ki67 index before NACT, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), and hormone receptor (HR) status. The model showed good discrimination with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.825 (95% CI, 0.772 to 0.878) in the training cohort, and 0.755 (95% CI, 0.658 to 0.851) and 0.79 (95% CI, 0.724 to 0.856) in the internal and external validation cohorts, respectively. The calibration curve presented good agreement between prediction by nomogram and actual observation, and decision curve analysis (DCA) indicated that the nomogram had good net benefits in clinical scenarios. CONCLUSION: This study constructed a validated nomogram based on age, AJCC T stage, Ki67 index before NACT, HER2, and HR status, which could be non-invasively applied to personalize the prediction of pCR in BC patients treated with NACT.