Ruiqiu Chen

1 Introduction Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a predominant cause of malignancy, ranks as the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide [1]. With a 5-year survival rate of 18% and 2.3% in metastatic advanced disease [2], HCC represents a major global health burden largely due to its asymptomatic presentation and often late-stage diagnosis.

The study was approved by the ethics board of our hospital. Informed consent was waived due to the retrospective nature of this study. We collected three independent patient cohorts. First, a primary cohort comprised 655 patients from the medical center A was included and split into training and validation set. These patients were diagnosed with HCC and underwent surgery between January 2018 and July 2022 (Appendix S1).