Equipping the 8th Edition American Joint Committee on Cancer Staging for Gastric Cancer with the 15-Node Minimum: a Population-Based Study Using Recursive Partitioning Analysis

Bakcground The recently proposed 8th American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging for gastric cancer (GC) did not include the evaluated lymph node (ELN) count as a prognostic indicator. In this study, we performed recursive partitioning analysis (RPA) to objectively combine the 15-ELN threshold and 8th AJCC stage to refine the staging for GC. Methods We analyzed 19,018 patients with non-metastatic GC from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. The dataset was randomly divided into training and validation sets. Results For each 8th AJCC stage, survival was significantly better for patients with ≥15 ELNs versus those with