Table 3. The correlation between the positivity rate of twist, vimentin expression in CTCs and clinical variables of HCC patients.

	Twist	Vimentin	Twist and vimentin coexpression
Clinical variable	P-value	P-value	P-value
Age	NSa	NSa	NSa
Sex	NSa	NSa	NSa
Cirrhosis	NSa	NSa	NSa
Tumor number	NSa	NSa	NSa
Etiology	NSb	NSb	NSb
Child–pugh class	NSb	NSb	NSb
AFP	NSb	NSb	NSb
Portal vein tumor thrombus	<0.001a	0.003a	<0.001a
Edmondson–Steiner grade	NSa	NSa	NSa
Milan criteria	NSa	0.036a	0.044a
Tumor size	NSb	<0.001b	0.004b
TNMc	0.04b	0.003b	0.001b

NS, not significant

^aP-values from the Fisher's exact test

^bP-values from Spearman's rank correlation analysis

^cSixth edition of UICC TNM staging system of HCC (2002)