It can be difficult to find different features associated with that low level of specificity.
The operational case definition of CCD, used in this study, may have a low level of specificity and, thus, runs the risk of misclassifying individual colonies, which in turn can bias results [10].
Both classifiers performed inferiorly to the 42 gene-transcript classifier, with the GWAS DEGs classifier achieving an accuracy rate of 59.0 ± 4.6% with sensitivity 55.0 ± 5.2% and specificity 72.0 ± 9.0% and the only DEG's classifier demonstrating an accuracy of 76.0 ± 3.9% with sensitivity of 83.0 ± 3.9% but low level of specificity 53.0 ± 10.0%.
However, equally high values are obtained if tissues of different origin like liver and tumor are compared (253 (L/T) + 75 (T/L) = 328, Table 2c) indicating a low level of specificity and accordingly many false positive genes that are actually not suitable as potential target genes.
Table 1 contains the order in which E-codes were assigned, with "1" (e.g. E006.2 "Activities involving golf") referring to the highest level of specificity and "7" referring to the lowest level of specificity (e.g. E849.4 "Accidents occurring in place for recreation and sport").
Thus a preventive strategy could be to use low levels of low-specificity, antiproliferative treatments to either target reductions in cancer cell proliferation or shift the competitive balance in favour of healthy cells, for example, through interference with oncogene-driven cell competition.
At present, PSA is the best standard biomarker used for early detection of PC [1, 2, 3, 4], although it has only moderate sensitivity (PC may still be present at low levels of PSA) and specificity (benign prostatic hyperplasia or prostatitis may cause false positive results) [1, 2, 5, 6].
Indeed, as pointed out in a previous study [32], some programs have very low levels of sensitivity or specificity, whereas others return too short consensus sequence (<1 kb).
