Fig. 1.

a–c Detection of circulating mortalin and mortalin autoantibody level in healthy, liver cirrhosis and HCC serum samples by sandwich ELISA. a Circulating mortalin protein levels in 150 serum samples of healthy, cirrhosis, and HCC samples. b The level of mortalin in HCC at each distinct tumor stage. c Serum mortalin level has no significant different in cirrhosis plus HCC and only HCC patients. d–f Detection of circulating mortalin autoantibody in healthy, cirrhosis, and HCC serum samples by sandwich ELISA. d The level of mortalin autoantibody significantly increased in cirrhosis patients in comparison to healthy individuals and HCC patients (P < 0.001). e There was no significant difference in mortalin autoantibody in each stage of HCC patients. f Serum mortalin autoantibody level was significantly increased in cirrhosis plus HCC patients compared to only HCC patients (P < 0.001). g–j Comparison of the diagnostic performance of serum mortalin and mortalin autoantibody in detection of cirrhosis and HCC patients by receiver operating characteristics (ROC), and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) is a measure of the overall performance of sensitivity and specificity. g Comparison of diagnostic performance of serum mortalin in detection of cirrhosis patients by receiver operating characteristics (ROC) (AUC = 0.58). h Comparison of diagnostic performance of serum mortalin in detection of HCC patients by receiver operating characteristics (ROC) (AUC = 0.67). i Comparison of diagnostic performance of serum mortalin autoantibody in detection of cirrhosis patients by receiver operating characteristics (ROC) (AUC = 0.87, P < 0.001). j Comparison of the diagnostic performance of serum mortalin autoantibody in detection of HCC patients by receiver operating characteristics (ROC) (AUC = 0.54)