Tumour Budding Is a Useful Predictor to Identify High-Risk Stage II Colon Cancer Patients After Curative Surgery

Although it is now accepted in the literature that tumour budding (TB) is a useful survival indicator in colon cancer (CC), there are still uncertainties about daily use. Here we methodologically examined the role of TB on survival in CC. In our study, we examined colon cancer patients who had surgery up to 15 years before presentation. TB was calculated separately using different comprehensive methodological methods. We first investigated an optimal evaluation method. Relationship with prognostic factors was better (Venous invasion [p = .001], advanced pT [p = .003], perineural invasion [p = .040], MSS [p = .016], advanced size [p = .001], tumour obstruction [p = .005], margin involvement [p = .043], and nodal involvement [p = .028]) in Method-1. Similarly, with the same method, the success of the cut-off value, the correlation of TB data (r = .724), and the repeatability of the method (Κappa = .53-.75) were quite good (ROC = .816 [.707-.925]). Then, survival analysis was performed using the best three methods, including this method. In univariate analysis using Method-1, survival analyses were worse in high TB patients (RFS: 81%, p