Figure 1

Volcano plot of soluble factors in pre-operative sera. Pre-operative blood was withdrawn from 33 patients with ovarian cancer, 15 benign ovarian mass and 21 with normal ovaries. A total of 28 serum soluble factors were measured using multiplexed bead immunoassay. One-way analyses of variance were conducted on each of the 28 log₂-transformed immune factors. For each immune factor, the three pairwise contrasts of means, malignant tumour versus healthy control, benign tumour versus healthy control and malignant tumour versus benign tumour, and their standard errors of differences, were calculated and the results of the pairwise t-tests were summarized in a volcano plot of statistical significance, −log₁₀(P-value), versus fold change, namely the difference in the group means of the log₂-transformed soluble factors concentrations. Volcano plot of statistical significance (−log₁₀(P-value) of contrasts versus contrasts expressed as differences on the log2 scale. Soluble factors with contrasts greater than a 2-fold change or with a P-value < 0.05 are labelled.