Estimating survival benefit of adjuvant therapy based on a Bayesian network prediction model in curatively resected advanced gallbladder adenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND: The factors affecting the prognosis and role of adjuvant therapy in advanced gallbladder carcinoma (GBC) after curative resection remain unclear. AIM: To provide a survival prediction model to patients with GBC as well as to identify the role of adjuvant therapy. METHODS: Patients with curatively resected advanced gallbladder adenocarcinoma (T3 and T4) were selected from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database between 2004 and 2015. A survival prediction model based on Bayesian network (BN) was constructed using the tree-augmented naïve Bayes algorithm, and composite importance measures were applied to rank the influence of factors on survival. The dataset was divided into a training dataset to establish the BN model and a testing dataset to test the model randomly at a ratio of 7:3. The confusion matrix and receiver operating characteristic curve were used to evaluate the model accuracy. CONCLUSION: The BN-based survival prediction model can be used as a decision-making support tool for advanced GBC patients. Adjuvant chemoradiotherapy is expected to improve the survival significantly for patients with node-positive disease.