In the Testing Cohort, Egfl7 showed a significantly higher sensitivity than AFP in discriminating early HCC from healthy individuals (77.4% vs. 65.3%, P = 0.0013; Table 2), and the AUROC [0.860 (95% CI: 0.840–0.895) vs. 0.868 (95% CI: 0.851–0.915), P = 0.704; Fig. 3a) and accuracy (80.2% vs. 83.8%, P = 0.184; Table 4) of Egfl7 were comparable with AFP. Here, AFP is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.