HOXD1 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: We attempted to develop a classifier for ESCC by combing the methylation of HOXL10 and HOXD1. The classifier obtains an AUC of 0.96 (95% CI 0.91–0.99), with a sensitivity of 94.8% and specificity of 87.5% at the optimal threshold of 0.72 determined by Youden index, suggesting its good performance in discriminating ESCC from normal samples.