Identification of Novel Gene Signature Predicting Lymph Node Metastasis in Papillary Thyroid Cancer via Bioinformatics Analysis and in vitro Validation

Abstract Background: Although with a good prognosis of papillary thyroid cancer (PTC), patients with PTC and also experiencing lymph node metastasis (LNM) had higher recurrence and mortality rates. Therefore it was essential to explore novel biomarkers or methods to predict and evaluate the situation in the stages of PTC. Methods: In this study, mRNA sequence datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) were utilized to obtain differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between PTC tumors and