Fig. 5

Discrimination of CA 19-9 for pancreatic cancer, benign disease, and healthy controls. No significant separation between the pancreatic cancer (n = 25), the benign samples (n = 10), and healthy controls (n = 24) was achieved. The performance of CA 19-9 alone is relatively poor with a large degree of overlap between cancer and healthy, cancer as well as benign and healthy emphasizing the poor suitability for CA 19-9 as a biomarker in a screening setting. P value was determined by Mann-Whitney U test. Box plots indicate the median and 25th and 75th percentiles. Whiskers indicate the 5th and 95th percentiles