Fig 1.
Summary of study design and inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Table 1.
Characteristics of PC patients and healthy controls.
Table 2.
PFAA values (μmol/L) for patients with PC and healthy controls in the training set.
Fig 2.
The results of receiver–operator characteristic (ROC) curve analysis of PFAA profiles in the training set (120 PC and matching 600 HC). Axes show the AUC of ROC for each amino acid to discriminate patients from healthy controls. Black bold lines indicate the point where the AUC of ROC = 0.5.
Table 3.
Independence between PFAA used in the index and potential confounders such as BMI and smoking history.
Fig 3.
ROC curves of the PFAA index of PC patients compared with those of healthy controls in the training set (120 PC and matching 600 HC) (A) and the validation set (240 PC and 7772 HC) (B).
Table 4.
Discrimination performance of PFAA index.
Fig 4.
ROC curves of the PFAA index with different tumor stages, sizes, and locations.
(A) ROC curves of the PFAA index in stage IIA (red), stage IIB (pink), stage III (orange), and stage IV (yellow–green), respectively. (B) ROC curves in TS1 (red), TS2 (pink), TS3 (orange), and TS4 (yellow–green), respectively. TS1 ≤ 2.0 cm, 2.0 cm < TS2 ≤ 4.0 cm, 4.0 cm < TS3 ≤ 6.0 cm, and TS4 > 6.0 cm. (C) ROC curves in the pancreatic head (red), body (pink), and tail (orange), respectively.
Fig 5.
Correlation of PFAA index and other biomarkers (CA19-9, CEA, and elastase 1).
The dotted line shows the cut-off of each biomarker or PFAA index. For data analysis, the upper normal limits of CA19-9, CEA, and elastase-1 were defined as 37 U/mL, 5 ng/dL, and 300 ng/dL, respectively. There were no significant correlations between each biomarker and the PFAA index.