Statistical Analysis of Gene Expression

The relative mRNA levels were analyzed with SPSS for Windows software package version 13.0 (SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). All data were presented as the mean ± standard deviation (SD) for continuous variables. The Student’s t-test was used if the data have a normal distribution. Otherwise, the Kruskal–Wallis test was used. A two-sided p-value < 0.05 was taken as the level for statistical significance. ROC analysis was performed to explore the predictive accuracy of hub genes in the GSE15774 database. AUC was used to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of each gene. The genes with an AUC of more than 0.7 and p-value of less than 0.05 were used to evaluate the predictive accuracy of hub genes (Fang et al., 2021 (link); Kang et al., 2021 (link)).