ASO Author Reflections: Careful Development and Thoughtful Interpretation are Needed when Developing Online Prognostic Tools

Excerpt

Historically, cancer staging systems have been used to stratify patients into risk groups with fixed ranges of predicted survival outcome. However, there is often significant heterogeneity in outcomes within a stage, and there can also be substantial overlap across stages. In response, the use of nomograms and other prognostic models to obtain patient-specific outcome predictions based on a collection of variables has been increasing in popularity. Often, the resulting prediction models will be made available online so that both patients and doctors have easy access. In melanoma, three different prediction models are available online and, depending on a patient’s disease characteristics, the resulting predictions can vary in clinically meaningful ways.1‐3 This study aimed to critically assess the development and deployment of online prognostic tools through a demonstration of the differences in input variables and modeling procedures used in these three online melanoma prediction tools. …