A novel serum miRNA-pair classifier for diagnosis of sarcoma

PLoS One. 2020 Jul 16;15(7):e0236097. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236097. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) is a set of rare malignant tumor originated from mesoderm. For the prognosis of sarcoma, early diagnosis is important, however, currently no mature and non-invasive method for diagnosis exists. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of noncoding RNAs and their expression varies greatly, especially during tumor activity. The purpose of this study was to construct a predictive model for the diagnosis of sarcomas based on the relative expression level of miRNA in serum. miRNA array expression data of 677 samples including 402 malignant sarcoma samples and 275 healthy samples was used to construct the prediction model. Based on 6 gene pairs, random generalized linear model (RGLM) was constructed, with an accuracy of 100% in the internal test dataset and of 74.3% in the merged external dataset in prediction whether a serum sample was obtained from a sarcoma patient, with a specificity of 100% in the internal test dataset and 90.5% in the external dataset. In conclusion, our serum miRNA-pair classifier has the potential to be used for the screening of sarcoma with high accuracy and specificity.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Computational Biology*
  • Female
  • Gene Expression Profiling
  • Gene Regulatory Networks
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Mass Screening
  • MicroRNAs / blood*
  • MicroRNAs / genetics*
  • Sarcoma / blood*
  • Sarcoma / diagnosis*
  • Sarcoma / genetics

Substances

  • MicroRNAs

Grants and funding

The work was supported by the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81571530 and 81871245).