AFP and hepatocellular carcinoma: In the validation cohort consisting of 90 HCC subjects and 92 non‐HCC subjects, EV‐LINC00853 had better discriminative power in the diagnosis of all‐stage HCC and early‐stage HCC (AUC = 0.935 and 0.969, respectively) than AFP (AUC = 0.713 and 0.548, respectively).