AFP and hepatocellular carcinoma: Four features significantly differed between the two groups, and an elastic-net regularized logistic model evaluated with a leave-one-out cross-validation framework retained a single latent feature, achieving an out-of-fold ROC AUC of 0.785 (95% CI 0.602–0.967), with performance broadly comparable to that typically reported for AFP, the most commonly used biomarker for HCC.