Identification of risk and prognostic factors for intrahepatic vascular invasion in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma: a population-based study

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to develop nomograms to predict the risk of intrahepatic vascular invasion (IVI) of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients and estimate the overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) of HCC patients with IVI. METHODS: The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database was used to identify patients with HCC from 2010 to 2015. Ultimately, 1,287 HCC patients with IVI were included in this study and randomly divided into training (n=901) and validation (n=386) cohorts. Multivariate logistic regression analysis and multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression analysis were performed to construct nomograms to visually quantify the risk of IVI in patients with HCC and predict the prognosis. The prediction effect of nomograms was evaluated using Harrell’s concordance index (C-index), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, calibration plots, and decision curve analysis (DCA), respectively. RESULTS: The C-index of the nomogram for risk prediction was 0.730. The C-indices based on the nomogram were 0.762 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.745–0.779] and 0.770 (95% CI: 0.753–0.787) for OS and CSS prediction in the training cohort, respectively. In the validation cohort, the C-indices were 0.779 (95% CI: 0.752–0.806) and 0.795 (95% CI: 0.768–0.822) for OS prediction and CSS prediction, respectively. Overall, the ROC curve, calibration plots, and DCA indicated the good performance of nomograms. CONCLUSIONS: We identified the relevant risk and prognostic factors for IVI in patients with HCC. The nomograms performed well on validation and may help to facilitate clinical decision-making.