Fig. 6

Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis of microRNA expression in plasma exomes from normal subjects and patients with breast cancer. ROC curves for classifying plasma exosomes (breast cancer vs. normal) were produced using each microRNA expression value for miR-21 (a) and miR-1246 (b) separately, and for miR-21 and miR-1246 combined (c). For each patient sample and each microRNA, the average of three replicate expression values was computed. The resulting microRNA expression values were standardized for the statistical analysis. The area under the curve (AUC) with 95 % CI were computed for each ROC curve. The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test was used to test the null hypothesis that the AUC is equal to 0.5 (i.e., no predictive power)