Abstract

For patients with recurrent head and neck cancer, salvage surgery is an essential option that might potentially increase survival time and enhance quality of life. Salvage surgery efficacy, however, varies greatly, and it is still very difficult to find accurate survival indicators unique to head and neck cancer. With a cohort of patients receiving salvage surgery for head and neck cancer, the objective of this study is to externally evaluate survival predictions. We evaluated the prognostic significance of demographic, clinical, and pathological characteristics using a large dataset. According to our research, a number of clinical and pathological characteristics, including as the location of the tumor, the surgical margins, and the involvement of lymph nodes, are important indicators of prognosis for this group of patients. The study emphasizes the need of customized treatment planning and the requirement for ongoing research to refine survival prediction models.