Fig. 1.

Overall study design and patient cohorts involved in model development and validations. Screening of potential miRNA biomarkers for HFMD infection was performed on 3 EV71, 3 CA6 and 3 healthy pooled saliva samples. The 8 putative miRNA predictors from primary screen was subsequently used to form diagnostic models using the training set which includes 75% of the “Singapore Cohort” with support vector machines. Cross validation was carried out using k-fold validation method for 10 folds and respective performances of the two models were determined. Blinded validation of the two models was carried out using the test set which includes 25% of the “Singapore Cohort’ and the whole “Taiwan Cohort”.