AFP and hepatocellular carcinoma: Serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is a useful tumor marker for the detection and monitoring of HCC, but unfortunately the false negative rate with AFP level alone may be as high as 40% for patients with early stage HCC (Nobuhiro et al., 2015 ; Samah et al., 2017b), therefore, it is important to identify other molecular markers for the diagnosis of the disease.