Patients’ characteristics
The patients’ characteristics are shown in Table 1. For the entire cohort, 78 were male and 5 were female and the median age was 56 (39-72). The primary sites were in the pyriform sinus in 70 patients, pharyngeal wall in 8, and post-cricoid pharynx in five. Two patients were in stage III, 40 patients were in stage IVA, and 41 patients were in stage IVB. Both median of cycles of IC and CCRT were 2 (1-4). The detailed tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stages before IC were shown in Table S1. Besides, the baseline characteristics of the two subgroups of IC responders and non-responders were shown in Table S2.