Fig. 1

CAF Hub Genes were identified through the analysis of co-expression networks of CAF infiltration using WGCNA. (A,B) Kaplan–Meier analysis showed that OS was generally shorter in the high CAF infiltration group, as determined by algorithms including CAF_EPIC, CAF_MCPcount, CAF_TIDE, CAF_xCell, and Stromalscore, compared to the low infiltration group in patients from the TCGA-COAD (A) and GSE39582 (B) cohorts. (C,D) Clustering dendrograms indicated that genes with similar expression patterns were grouped into co-expression modules based on a height value below 0.2. (E,F) The heat map illustrated the correlations between each gene module and CAF-related phenotypes. Red represented a positive correlation, while blue represented a negative correlation; the deeper the color, the stronger the correlation. The value inside the parentheses represented the p-value of the correlation analysis.