Upgrade of the national registry of childhood tumours

Project

To upgrade the National Registry of Childhood Tumours (NRCT) to the standard of the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology, 3rd Edition (ICD-O-3).

Potential Benefits

The NRCT will be able to receive and export data from and to other Cancer Registries in the new standardized medical coding. The new coding system classifies and sub-divides cancers more accurately than previous systems.

Background

Advent IT has developed several programs for the NRCT database including:

NRCTDE - a data entry database front-end linked to the NRCT SQL Server database.
NRCTDU - a program to batch update and validate the existing database with new data.
NRCTVision - a program to display data held in the NRCT database case-by-case with a facility to call up scanned images of related documents.

Current Position

These programs utilise tumour data from site and type fields according to the second edition of the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology (ICD-O-2). A third field which groups tumours according to the International Classification of Childhood Cancers Second Edition (ICCC2) is derived from these fields using a SQL Server lookup table that contains permitted combinations of sites and types of cancer.

Required Changes

The Department of Health now wishes Cancer Registries to work to the ICD-O-3 standard so all stored procedures; views; functions and fields need to be altered to accept the new fields and calculate the ICCC3 derived field as described in Steliarova-Foucher et al.

References

International Classification of Childhood Cancer, third edition http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/adaptations/oncology/en/

Stiller CA (1993) Cancer registration: its uses in research, and confidentiality in the EC. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 47, 342-344.

Steliarova-Foucher E, Stiller C, Lacour B & Kaatsch P (2005) International classification of childhood cancer, third edition. Cancer, 103, 1457-1467.