AFP and hepatocellular carcinoma: Although alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is currently widely used in early HCC screening and prognosis assessment, it is affected not only by many non-hepatic carcinoma-related factors, but its expression level is also significantly increased in other diseases, such as acute viral hepatitis (AHA), resulting in low sensitivity and specificity (Huo et al., 2018; Cai et al., 2019).