Fig. 4

A classifier for monitoring early transition to DKD. a A bioinformatic analysis workflow to find candidate biomarkers between DKD3 and Diabetes samples. b Venn diagram showing the overlap of DEPs in the discovery and the validation set. c ROC curve of distinguishing DKD3 and Diabetes predicted by a 4-protein classifier. d Dotplot indicating the Diabetes and DKD samples and their predicted stages by the classifier. Each point represented one urine sample. Blue and green dots presents Diabetes and DKD, respectively. The x-axis indicates the predicted DKD stage 3. Blue dots positioned on the right side of the Prediction line were predicted incorrectly as DKD3 by the model and were used as putative pre-DKD in the subsequent analysis. e Boxplots displaying the iFOT intensities of the 4 biomarkers (CP, TF, SERPINA5, VPS4A) in Diabetes, DKD3, DKD4, and CKD samples. f The risk scores(left panel) and the 4-marker expression (right panel) of the patient (clinical ID: 8073510). g A schematic summary of bioinformatic analysis workflow that derived the 3 prediction models in this study