Preoperative Prediction of Lymph Node Metastasis in Colorectal Cancer Using Routinely Collected Clinical Data: Multicenter Retrospective Machine Learning Model Development and External Validation Study

Background

Preoperative nodal assessment in colorectal cancer (CRC) remains imperfect, and uncertainty regarding pathological lymph node metastasis (LNM) may persist despite conventional imaging. Machine learning using routinely available preoperative information may provide complementary patient-level risk estimates without requiring radiomic feature extraction or molecular testing.