A Generic Nomogram Predicting the Stage of Liver Fibrosis Based on Serum Biochemical Indicators Among Chronic Hepatitis B Patients

Abstract

Introduction: Liver fibrosis staging is of great importance for reducing unnecessary injuries and prompting treatment in chronic viral hepatitis B patients. Liver biopsy is not suitable to act a screening method although it is a gold standard because of various shortcomings. This study aimed to establish a predictive nomogram as a convenient tool to effectively identify potential patients with different stages of liver fibrosis for patients with chronic hepatitis B. Methods: A nomogram for multinomial model was developed in a training set to calculate the probability for each stage of fibrosis and tested in a validation set. Fibrosis stages were subgrouped as followed: severe fibrosis/cirrhosis (F3–F4), moderate fibrosis (F2), and nil-mild fibrosis (F0–F1). The indicators were demographic characteristics and biochemical indicators of patients. Continuous indicators were divided into several groups according to the optimal candidate value generated by the decision tree. Results: This study recruited 964 HBV patients undergoing percutaneous liver biopsy. The multinomial model with 10 indicators was transformed into the final nomogram. The calibration plot showed a good agreement between nomogram-predicted and observed probability of different fibrosis stages. Areas under the receiver operating characteristics (AUROCs) for severe fibrosis/cirrhosis were 0.809 for training set and 0.879 for validation set. For moderate fibrosis, the AUROCs were 0.75 and 0.781. For nil-mild fibrosis, the AUROCs were 0.792 and 0.843. All the results above showed great predictive performance in predicting the stage of fibrosis by our nomogram. Conclusion: Our model demonstrated good discrimination and extensibility in internal and external validation. The proposed nomogram in this study resulted in great reliability and it can be widely used as a convenient and efficient way.