About PSC
Pancreatic stellate cell (PSC) is a special type of pancreatic stromal cell with two phenotypes: quiescent (qPSC) and activated (aPSC). Generally, PSC is quiescent, mainly located at the base of the acini and around vascular cells. qPSC plays an important role in vitamin A storage. Under stress conditions such as mechanical or pathological damage to the pancreas, qPSC could be activated and transformed into aPSC, which could produce large amounts of extracellular matrix proteins. Moreover, aPSC was proven to be associated with chronic pancreatitis and adenocarcinoma.
About PSC-Stat
We developed a machine learning method-based tool named PSC-stat which could distinguish the active status of PSC based on transcriptome data. The proposed model showed high prediction performance (AUC ≥ 0.963) with the expression level of 15 genes on both training and testing sets, demonstrating that PSC-stat has a superior performance in classifying the phenotypes of PSC.