Fig. 2

Correlation of tCTCs and GM⁺CTCs with the clinical feature of BC patients. a, b Cell numbers of tCTCs (a) and GM⁺CTCs (b) in clinical subgroups of grading, lymph node invasion, distant metastasis, and clinical stage. c ROC curves of tCTCs and GM⁺CTCs in the diagnosis of metastatic BC patients. d Determination of the positive threshold for tCTCs and GM⁺CTCs through the Youden index. e Comparison of the efficacy of tCTCs⁺ and GM⁺CTCs⁺ indexes in the diagnosis of BC metastasis. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01 and ***P < 0.001