Diagnostics
Systemic Inflammatory Biomarkers and Unsupervised Phenotyping of Surgical Pleurodesis Outcomes in Malignant Pleural Effusion: A Retrospective Single-Centre Study
By Luca Frasca, Ilaria Suriano, Antonio Sarubbi and 4 others.
Abstract
Background
Pleurodesis is widely used to control malignant pleural effusion (MPE), but reliable pre-procedural predictors of success remain lacking. We assessed whether routinely available systemic inflammatory biomarkers predict short-term pleurodesis outcome and explored multidimensional inflammatory phenotypes.
Methods
This retrospective single-center cohort included 144 patients who underwent pleurodesis for MPE between January 2021 and August 2025. Pre-procedural systemic immune-inflammation index (SII), neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), and C-reactive protein (CRP) were evaluated using receiver operating characteristic analysis. K-means clustering, principal component analysis, and uniform manifold approximation and projection were used for exploratory phenotyping.