Fig. 1

Correlation of the budding score to clinical data. The externally provided budding score of 328 cases showed a correlation to the patient’s nodal status (a) and to the regression-free survival (b), as previously published by [9, 10]. Furthermore, within the database there is also a significant correlation between the budding score (grades 1 to 4 with the intervals [0–5], [5–17], [17–20] and [20-∞] to stratify the absolute number of tumor buds [9]) and the morphology-based tumor grading (Grade 1–4) (c)