Prognostication for Patients Receiving Palliative Radiation Therapy

Estimation of patient prognosis plays a central role in guiding decision making for the palliative management of metastatic disease, and a number of statistical models have been developed to provide survival estimates for patients in this context. In this review, we discuss several well-validated survival prediction models for patients receiving palliative radiotherapy to sites outside of the brain. Key considerations include the type of statistical model, model performance measures and validation procedures, studies’ source populations, time points used for prognostication, and details of model output.