Fig. 1

The correlations of TMB among single-region tissue, multi-region tissues and blood. a Single-region tTMB vs. multi-region tTMB & bTMB vs. multi-region tTMB. The Pearson correlations were performed between single-region tTMB and multi-region tTMB (blue, r = 0.94), and between bTMB and multi-region tTMB (red, r = 0.47). TMB reflected somatic non-synonymous SNVs, insertions, and deletions per megabase of the panel region. Single-region tTMB was defined as the number of somatic non-synonymous mutations per megabase from single region. Multi-region tTMB was calculated with non-repetitive mutations from all regions per megabase. bTMB was analyzed with tumor-derived mutations from ctDNA. b bTMB level evaluation using multi-region tTMB level as standard. The Pearson correlations between bTMB and multi-region tTMB in all patients (left), I-II stage patients (middle), and III-IV stage patients (right) were 0.47, 0.47 and 0.58, respectively. Tumor stage were evaluated following the guidelines in the International Staging System for Lung Cancer, 7th edition. The sensitivity (true positive rate: the number of high-level bTMB & high-level multi-region tTMB patients divided by the number of high-level multi-region tTMB patients) and specificity (true negative rate: the number of low-level bTMB & low-level multi-region tTMB patients divided by the number of low-level multi-region tTMB patients) were analysed using multi-region tTMB level as golden standard. TMB of > 9 mutations/Mb was classified as high, using the top quartile threshold of 2000 samples from database of Geneplus. Abbreviations: TMB, tumor mutational burden; tTMB, tissue TMB; bTMB, blood TMB; r, Pearson correlation coefficient