Figure 6.

Illustrative overview of the combined pipeline. Serum samples of 98 TGCT patients and 29 healthy male blood donors were submitted to miR-371a-3p quantification by real-time quantitative PCR and to RASSF1A_M quantification via ddPCR. Each male patient figure represents one of the TGCT patients in the study. The color code identifies if the patient was diagnosed because of positivity for both markers (blue), positivity for miR-371a-3p only (yellow) or positivity for RASSF1A only (orange). The patients with pure teratoma are highlighted by “TE”. The combined pipeline detected all TGCT patients (including those with pure teratoma) while all tested controls were negative, resulting in a combined sensitivity and specificity of 100%. Abbreviations: ddPCR—droplet digital PCR; cfDNA—cell-free DNA; RASSF1A_M—hypermethylated RASSF1A; RT-qPCR—real-time quantitative PCR; TE—teratoma; TGCT—testicular germ cell tumor.