Establishment and validation of a nomogram for predicting immune-related prognostic features in trunk melanoma-specific death

BACKGROUND: Trunk melanoma is one of the most common and deadly types of melanomas. Multiple factors are associated with the prognosis of patients with trunk melanoma. Currently, direct, and reliable clinical tools for early assessment of individual specific risk of death are limited, and most of them are prediction models for all-cause death. Their accuracy in predicting competitiveness events, which make up a relatively large portion, may be substantially compromised. Hence, we conducted this study to investigate the risk factors of trunk melanoma-specific death to establish a comprehensive prediction model suitable for clinical application. METHODS: Patients with trunk melanoma analyzed in this study were from the SEER program [2010–2015]. The random sampling method was used to split the included cases into the training and validation cohorts at a ratio of 7:3. Univariate and multivariate competing risk models were used to screen the independent influencing factors of specific death, and then a nomogram covering these independent predictors was constructed. The concordance index (C-index) and a calibration curve were used to evaluate the calibration degree and accuracy of the nomogram. RESULTS: We identified 21,198 patients with trunk melanoma from the SEER database, and 3,814 of them died (17.99%). Among the death cases, deaths from other causes accounted for 66.50%The prognostic nomogram included 8 variables and 16 independent influencing factors. The overall C-index in the training set was 0.89, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for predicting 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival was 0.928 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.911–0.945], 0.907 (95% CI: 0.895–0.918), and 0.891 (95% CI: 0.879–0.902), respectively. The C-index of the model in the validation set was 0.89, and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) for predicting 1-, 3-, and 5-year cancer-specific death (CSD) was 0.927 (95% CI: 0.899–0.955), 0.916 (95% CI: 0.901–0.930), and 0.905 (95% CI: 0.899–0.921). Both the training set and the validation set showed the ideal calibration degree. CONCLUSIONS: This model can be used as a potential tool for prognostic risk management of trunk melanoma in the presence of many competing events.