HSP90AA1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: Subsequently a subgroup analysis was conducted to evaluate the plasma HSP90α initial diagnosis value for early HCC patients and the results demonstrated that plasma HSP90α had a poor performance for the initial diagnosis of early HCC when patients had tumors of less than 2 cm (AUC = 0.635, Fig. 4a) or the early stage of HCC as characterized by patients at BCLC-A stage (AUC = 0.714, Fig. 5a).