According to HCC stages (Table S7), PTX3 levels also remained highly discriminative of early-stage HCC from chronic hepatitis [AUC (95%CI) 0.935 (0.894–0.963), sensitivity 94.1%, specificity 79.3%, Fig. 3A], cirrhosis [AUC (95%CI) 0.897 (0.840–0.938), sensitivity 69.1%, specificity 98.0%, Fig. 3B] and chronic HBV infection without HCC [AUC (95%CI) 0.920 (0.885–0.947), sensitivity 76.5%, specificity 90.70%, Fig. 3C, Table S8]. Here, PTX3 is linked to chronic hepatitis.