Fig 1. The plasma miRNA profiles are much more variable for HCC patients than those for heathy subjects.

A. The correlation coefficients for the pairwise comparison of healthy subjects are close to 1.0 between individuals. F indicates female, and M indicates male. B. The plasma miRNAs have minor gender bias among healthy subjects. miRNAs with an RPM more than 10 were used to analyse the types of miRNAs in the plasma. The types of differential miRNAs between genders are comparable to those within gender. C. Comparison of the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R) comparison between healthy subjects and HCC patients. The differentiation between these two populations is significant. The P value is less than 0.001.