ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Pharmacology of Anti-Cancer Drugs
Artificial Intelligence–Based Prognostic Modeling of Immunoradiotherapy in Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer Stage C Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Multicenter Retrospective Study
Yuan Li 1,2
Ying-Jie Li 2
Lei Yang 2
Su Li 2
Shuo Chen 3
Yuan-Ping Zhong 1
Lianbin Wen 4
Yanqiong Song 5
1. Department of Anesthesiology, Affiliated Hospital of Zunyi Medical College, Zunyi, China
2. Sichuan College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Mianyang, China
3. University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
4. Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences and Sichuan People's Hospital, Chengdu, China
5. Sichuan Cancer Hospital and Institute, Chengdu, China
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Abstract
Background: Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) stage C hepatocellular carcinoma is associated with poor prognosis, and conventional systemic therapies offer limited survival benefit. Immunotherapy combined with radiotherapy has emerged as a promising approach, but patient responses are heterogeneous. Artificial intelligence (AI) may facilitate individualized prognostic prediction to guide therapy. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 198 BCLC stage C HCC patients from three centers. The experimental group received immunoradiotherapy plus targeted therapy, and the control group received immunotherapy plus targeted therapy. Baseline characteristics were balanced using inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) . Five machine learning models (Cox, LASSO, DT, RSF, and XGBoost) were developed to predict 6-, 12-, and 24-month overall survival. Results: Before and after IPTW adjustment, the experimental group showed longer progression-free and overall survival than the control group. In the training cohort, the RSF model achieved the highest concordance index (0.7458). In the validation cohort, it also demonstrated the best receiver operating characteristic – area under the curve (ROC-AUC) values for 6-, 12-, and 24-month OS (0.821, 0.818, and 0.791, respectively). Decision curve analysis and calibration plots indicated good stability. Variable importance analysis showed that tumor number, tumor size, and portal vein tumor thrombosis consistently contributed substantially to survival prediction across all time points. Conclusions: Immunoradiotherapy represents a promising therapeutic option for BCLC stage C HCC. The RSF-based model may support individualized prognostic risk stratification and clinical decision-making.
Summary
Keywords
artificial intelligence, BCLC, Hepatocellular Carcinoma, immunoradiotherapy, Prognostic modeling
Received
10 January 2026
Accepted
19 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Li, Li, Yang, Li, Chen, Zhong, Wen and Song. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Yuan Li
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