Figure 3

Heatmap of validation data and Kaplan-Meier plot of disease recurrence. (A) Unsupervised hierarchical clustering of the quantitative real-time PCR (validation data) showing the maximum expression levels of MMP1, P4HA2, THBS2 and COL4A1 in margins from patients with and without recurrence and with a follow-up time ≥ 12 months. Margins annotated with darker green above the heatmap are from patients who experienced recurrence. Margins from patients with locally recurrent tumors show increased expression levels of the four-gene signature compared to patients who did not recur. (B) Kaplan-Meier plot of quantitative real-time PCR data for patients in the validation set. Patients are assigned to high or low risk based on their four-gene signature risk score. As seen in the Kaplan-Meier plot, patients with over-expression of the 4-gene signature are at high risk for disease recurrence; all patients who experienced recurrence in the validation set are in the high risk group, suggesting that over-expression of this signature was highly predictive of recurrence in the validation set.