A qualitative signature for early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma based on relative expression orderings

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Currently, using biopsy specimens to confirm suspicious liver lesions of early hepatocellular carcinoma are not entirely reliable because of insufficient sampling amount and inaccurate sampling location. It is necessary to develop a signature to aid early hepatocellular carcinoma diagnosis using biopsy specimens even when the sampling location is inaccurate. METHODS: Based on the within‐sample relative expression orderings of gene pairs, we identified a simple qualitative signature to distinguish both hepatocellular carcinoma and adjacent non‐tumour tissues from cirrhosis tissues of non‐hepatocellular carcinoma patients. RESULTS: A signature consisting of 19 gene pairs was identified in the training data sets and validated in 2 large collections of samples from biopsy and surgical resection specimens. For biopsy specimens, 95.7% of 141 hepatocellular carcinoma tissues and all (100%) of 108 cirrhosis tissues of non‐hepatocellular carcinoma patients were correctly classified. Especially, all (100%) of 60 hepatocellular carcinoma adjacent normal tissues and 77.5% of 80 hepatocellular carcinoma adjacent cirrhosis tissues were classified to hepatocellular carcinoma. For surgical resection specimens, 99.7% of 733 hepatocellular carcinoma specimens were correctly classified to hepatocellular carcinoma, while 96.1% of 254 hepatocellular carcinoma adjacent cirrhosis tissues and 95.9% of 538 hepatocellular carcinoma adjacent normal tissues were classified to hepatocellular carcinoma. In contrast, 17.0% of 47 cirrhosis from non‐hepatocellular carcinoma patients waiting for liver transplantation were classified to hepatocellular carcinoma, indicating that some patients with long‐lasting cirrhosis could have already gained hepatocellular carcinoma characteristics. CONCLUSIONS: The signature can distinguish both hepatocellular carcinoma tissues and tumour‐adjacent tissues from cirrhosis tissues of non‐hepatocellular carcinoma patients even using inaccurately sampled biopsy specimens, which can aid early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma.