{"entity":{"id":"clinical-covariates","kind":"term","name":"Clinical covariates (age, stage, nodes, treatment flags)","aka":["clinical covariates","clinical variables","treatment flags","radiotherapy flag","chemotherapy flag","clinical baseline model"],"tldr":"Clinical covariates are the ordinary facts about a patient, such as age, stage, node count and whether they had chemotherapy or radiotherapy, that any prognostic model must beat or build on.","summary":"Survival models relate time to event to one or more covariates (Wikipedia on proportional hazards models). In cancer the routine ones are age, sex, stage, grade, nodal status, receptor status and treatment indicators for surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and endocrine therapy. A molecular or imaging model is only useful if it adds discrimination over a clinical baseline built from these, and treatment flags are confounders as well as predictors because sicker patients are treated differently.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_hazards_model","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_hazards_model"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["grade-vs-stage","lymph-node-status","external-validation"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/clinical-variables."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Clinical"},"route":"/terms/clinical-covariates/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"ajcc-stage","kind":"term","name":"AJCC stage (TNM staging manual)","route":"/terms/ajcc-stage/"},{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"external-validation","kind":"term","name":"External validation","route":"/terms/external-validation/"},{"id":"grade-vs-stage","kind":"term","name":"Grade versus stage","route":"/terms/grade-vs-stage/"},{"id":"lymph-node-status","kind":"term","name":"Lymph node status (node-positive / node-negative)","route":"/terms/lymph-node-status/"},{"id":"organ-of-origin-signal","kind":"term","name":"Tissue-of-origin signal in tumour data","route":"/terms/organ-of-origin-signal/"}]}}