Fig. 1

Clinicopathological features and gut microbial diversity of all patients. a Clinicopathological features and clinical outcomes of all 113 HCC patients. The green dotted line represents 5-year survival; the purple dotted line represents 2-year disease-free survival. b Shannon-Wiener curves between numbers of fecal samples and estimated richness. Compared with small HCC, fecal microbial diversities, as estimated by the Shannon index (c), Simpson index (d), and Invsimpson index (e), were significantly increased in patients with non-small HCC (p = 0.048, 0.027, and 0.027, respectively; *p < 0.05, Wilcoxon rank sum test). f A Venn diagram illustrates that 541 of the total richness of 1002 OTUs were shared among three groups, while 576 out of 877 OTUs were shared between the small HCC and non-small HCC subgroups. g Beta diversity was evaluated using NMDS by Bray-Curtis. Boxplot “boxes” indicate the first, second, and third quartiles of the data