Fig. 7

CTpathway identifies significant pathways in data sets with few DEGs and early-stage cancer patients. a The comparison of identified pathways for data sets with a different number of DEGs in six methods. The bar graph shows the number of DEGs for 12 representative data sets. The heatmap shows the number of significant pathways at the significance level of FDR < 0.05, identified by different methods for data sets with a different number of DEGs, divided by the number of all candidate pathways. The target pathways are marked as green stars. b The heatmap of enrichment results (P-value) for the target pathways of 10 early-stage cancer types using different methods. c, d Enrichment results (P-value, y-axis) for the target pathways of TCGA COAD data sets of tissue samples (c) and LUAD blood samples (d) of different stages using different methods. The dashed line represents a cutoff (P-value = 0.05)