Page 4 of 28:
In the first line of the Introduction, I think “mainly” should be “main”.

Page 4 of 28:
It states that this is a study of “AFP-negative HCC patients” but some of the analysis seems to be on AFP-positive subjects. Please clarify.

Page 5 of 28:
In the "Human serum sampIes" section it is not clear here that the five datasets referred to are in fact the Discovery, Training, Validation, At-risk and Specific validation sets described later.

Page 5 of 28:
Referring to the method of diagnosis, if AFP was used in the diagnosis process, then this needs to be stated as it has an influence on the interpretation of test performance.

Page 12 of 28:
Near the end of the second paragraph of the Discussion, here is a suggested improved sentence:- “To our knowledge, these eight TAAbs identified as biomarkers for early detection of HCC have barely been reported and we are the first to provide evidence for this.”

Page 12 of 28:
The second paragraph ends with:- “Here, we further offered the clews of these autoantibodies for exploring the biological functions in HCC.” This needs editing as it is difficult to understand the English.

TABLE 2
The NPV=18.0 in the first row looks wrong.

TABLE 2
Because this is a case-control study, the Accuracy, PPV and NPV figures need to be prevalence-adjusted.