PPBP and non-small cell lung carcinoma: For all the NSCLC patients combined, CTAPIII/CXCL7 exhibited optimal efficacy in diagnosis with the highest AUC (Fig. 2E, training set: AUC 0.806, 95% CI: 0.748–0.863; Fig. 2F test set AUC 0.773, 95% CI 0.711–0.835) (Table 2).