Abstract: Background and purpose: IIn the past, the prognosis of glioma was mainly predicted by biochemical indicators. In clinical practice, it is difficult to predict the prognosis of glioma due to the contamination of various factors, which leads to relatively poor prediction efficiency. This study aimed to investigate the value of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) by microfluidic core in the diagnosis and prognosis of gliomas. Methods: A total of 96 patients with brain glioma admitted to the Department of Neurosurgery in People's Hospital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region from March 2016 to March 2020 were studied. CTCs were enriched in peripheral blood by microfluidic core technology, and identified by immunofluorescence method. The regression model was used to analyze the relationship between the detection of CTCs in peripheral blood of glioma patients and the clinical characteristics of glioma patients. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was established, and the survival curve was made to analyze CTCs test results and the postoperative survival time of glioma patients. Results: CTCs enrichment by microfluidic core technology combined with immunofluorescence showed CTCs with a positive detection rate of 42.71%, and the number of CTCs detected in peripheral blood was (66.27±6.36)/mL. Univariate analysis showed that CTC in peripheral blood was closely correlated to tumor stage, histological type, cystic lymph node metastasis and neuron-specific enolase (NSE) (P<0.05), but had no correlation with age, gender, smoking status Cartesian functional status score, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) content and other clinical characteristics. Multivariate analysis showed that tumor stage, histological type, NSE expression and CTCs were closely related. The area under the curve (AUC) of tumor stage, histological type and NSE were 0.645, 0.687 and 0.720, respectively, and the predictive probability AUC was 0.814 (P<0.05). The CTCs test results and the postoperative survival curve of glioma patients were analyzed. Conclusion: The microfluidic core technology established in this study can quantitatively detect peripheral blood CTCs in patients with glioma, whose CTCs level is closely related to tumor stage, histological type and NSE, and directly affects the long-term survival rate of patients with glioma. Therefore, peripheral blood CTCs can be used as an important indicator for the diagnosis and prognosis of glioma patients, providing a new idea for clinical research.

Key words: Microfluidic core technology, Circulating tumor cells, Glioma, Prognosis