Fig. 4 indicated the expression of nine core genes in LSCC patients and normal patients. Then, we investigated the prognostic value of core genes using Kaplan–Meier analysis. As shown in Fig. 5A, among the above genes only high BIRC5 showed shorter overall survival when compared with other genes. Further, we evaluated BIRC5 expression in LSCC by using the RNA-seq data in TCGA (Fig. 5B). By mining previously reported data, we found that high level of BIRC5 was significantly associated with higher tumor grade (Fig. 5C). Here, BIRC5 is linked to neoplasm.