AFP and hepatocellular carcinoma: In the Validation Cohort, the AUROC, sensitivity and accuracy of Egfl7 in discriminating early HCC from CLD were all dramatically higher than AFP [0.787 (95% CI: 0.717–0.851) vs. 0.563 (95% CI: 0.489–0.648), 75.9% vs. 36.1, 74.1% vs. 59.7%, respectively; P < 0.0001; Fig. 4b and Table 5].