Table 2. Detailed patient information for the three colorectal cancer datasets used to corroborate our analysis.

Datasets	GSE115513	GSE41655	GSE71008
Number of miRNAs available	2006	851	421
Patient nationality	USA	China	USA
Platform	Agilent-046064 Unrestricted Human miRNA V19.0 Microarray	Agilent-021827 Human miRNA Microarray	Illumina Genome Analyzer
Tissue type	Paired tumour and normal tissue	Tumour and normal tissue	Plasma microvesicles
Number of samples
Tumour	750 (54%)	33 (69%)	100 (67%)*
Normal	649 (46%)	15 (31%)	50 (33%)*
Age (mean ± SD1 years)
Tumour sample patients	65 ± 11	63 ± 11	55 ± 18
Normal sample patients	65 ± 11	48 ±14	54 ± 14
Gender
Female	667 (48%)	16 (33%)	74 (49%)
Male	732 (52%)	32 (67%)	76 (51%)
Tumour Site
Colon	792 (57%)	-	-
Rectum	607 (43%)	-	-

1 – standard deviation.

“-“– unspecified.

“*”– Tumour = cancerous patient samples; Normal = healthy individual samples.