Abstract: OBJECTIVE To explore the etiological characteristics of postoperative incision infection in the breast cancer patients and analyze the diagnostic values of mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1)/hypoxia inducible factor 1α (HIF1α) pathways-related genes. METHODS Totally 80 breast cancer patients who were complicated with postoperative incision infection and treated in Sichuan Provincial Cancer Hospital from Jan 2018 to Dec 2020 were assigned as the infection group, 45 patients who were not complicated with infection were assigned as the non-infection, and 80 healthy women who received physical examination were chosen as the control group. The etiological characteristics of the incision infection of the infection group were analyzed, the relative expression levels of mTORC1/HIF1α pathways in peripheral blood were detected by PCR, and the values of mTORC1/HIF1α-related factors in diagnosis of the incision infection were evaluated by means of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. RESULTS Totally 127 strains of pathogens were isolated from the 80 breast cancer patients complicated with postoperative incision infection, 78 (61.42%) of which were gram-negative bacteria, 46 (36.22%) were gram-positive bacteria, and 3 (2.36%) were fungi. The relative expression levels of mTORC1, HIF1α, glucose transporter 1 (Glut1), M2 pyruvate kinase (PKM2), glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) and troponin (TPI) were higher in the infection group and the non-infection group than in the control group, and the relative expression levels of the above indexes of the infection group were higher than those of the non-infection group(P＜0.05). ROC curve analysis showed that the areas under curves (AUCs) of mTORC1, HIF1α, Glut1, PKM2, GPI and TPI were all greater than 0.7 in diagnosis of the postoperative incision infection, the indexes had high predictive values. CONCLUSION The breast cancer patients complicated with postoperative incision infection show remarkable rise of expression levels of mTORC1/HIF1α pathways, which have values in diagnosis of postoperative infection.