Fig. 4

Expression and Kaplan-Meier overall survival analysis of the eight-miRNAs signature in our validation cohort of 48 bladder cancer patients. Heat map shows relative fold change of miRNAs in bladder cancer compared with normal adjacent tissue determined by qRT-PCR (a). Hierarchical clustering of 48 paired tumor tissues and adjacent normal tissue with the 8 deferentially expressed miRNAs using average linkage clustering. Every row represents an individual miRNA, and each column represents an individual sample. Pseudocolours indicate transcript levels from low to high on a log 2 scale from −3 to 3, ranging from a low association strength (dark, black) to high (bright, red, or green). Kaplan-Meier recurrence-free survival and overall survival analysis by X-tile plots cut-off point (b, c, d). X-tile plots of training sets are shown in the left panels. The plot showed the chi-squared log-rank values created when the cohort was divided into two groups. The optimal cut-point highlighted by the black circle in the left panels (b) is shown on a histogram of the entire cohort (middle panels, c) and a Kaplan-Meier plot (right panels, d). P value was determined by using the cut-point defined in the training subset to parse a separate validation subset. The optimal cut-point for prognostic index determined by X-tile analysis from the validation cohort and reached high statistical significance