Fig. 4

Workflow for the ANN-model. For the test phase (II), 576 samples were randomly split into 10 equally sized groups. One ANN model was built using 90% of cases as training set and the remaining 10% as verification set. This procedure was performed 10 times to generate 10 ANN models. Five hundred ANN models were obtained after a total running of 50 times. Each ANN model provided the following outputs: 0 indicates healthy control and 1 indicates HCC. The committee vote was performed by averaging all outputs and then to classify the samples. The samples in the validation phase (III) used 500 ANN models for the blind test