Check out the latest quarterly updates made to NCI’s Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS), which provides terminology content, tools, and services to the biomedical and cancer research community for coding, analyzing, and sharing clinical and public health information. EVS provides the foundational layer for NCI’s informatics infrastructure, and it plays an important role in federal and international standards efforts.

New/Updated NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) Content

• New terminology for “thoracic tumors” has been aligned with the latest World Health Organization (WHO) standards.
• NCIt neoplasm terminology is compliant with the current WHO Classification of Tumors.
• The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) controlled terminology and corresponding NCIt value sets have been updated to the CDISC P48 publication. These updates integrated as part of the NCIt end-of-December 2021 release (NCIt 21.12d), including enhancements and extensions of the Study Data Tabulation Model (SDTM), the Clinical Data Acquisition Standards Harmonization (CDASH), the Analysis Data Model (ADaM), the Standard for Exchange of Nonclinical Data (SEND), CDISC Glossary, and Define-XML controlled terminology.
  • A total of 1,738 new concepts have been created across CDISC Glossary, ADaM, CDASH, Define-XML, Protocol Entities, SDTM, and SEND. This includes 1,212 ECG terminology concepts.
  • Questionnaires, Ratings, and Scales (QRS) terminology updates contain the publication of 76 response code lists to support the following QRS instruments:
    • AIMS: Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale Clinical Classification
    • HAM-A: Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale Clinical Classification
    • KPS: Karnofsky Performance Status Scale Clinical Classification
    • IPS: International Prostate Symptom Score Questionnaire
    • ATLAS: ATLAS Score Clinical Classification
    • KFSS: Kurtzke Functional Systems Scores Clinical Classification
    • APCH: Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II Clinical Classification
• Eighty-four (84) new SDTM value sets, two new protocol value sets, and 1 new SEND value set have been developed.
• Terminology was added to support the following documents and standards:
  • SDTM Implementation Guide v3.4 and SDTM model v2.0
  • The Pancreatic Cancer Therapeutic Area user guide
  • Type 1 Diabetes-Exercise and Nutrition therapeutic area user guide
  • CDISC LB domain to LOINC mapping

Other Terminologies/Ontologies That Have Been Published

• HGNC: HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (September 2021)
• CanMED: Cancer Medications Enquiry Database (November 2021)
• ChEBI: Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (v.204)
• GO: Gene Ontology (November 2021)
• HGNC: HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (November 2021)
• UMLS Semantic Network (v.12)

Terminology Mapping

• NCIt-HGNC-21.10d (October 2021)
• NCIt-HGNC-21.11e (November 2021)
• NCIt-HGNC -  21.12d (December 2021)
• NCIt-CHEBI-21.11e (v.204)

EVS Program Activities in Data Standards Development and Implementation

• NCIt has been officially adopted by the L’Agence du Numérique en Santé (ANS; translates to “digital health agency”) as an approved standard in France for cancer data and beyond. NCIt will be included in the French terminologies ecosystem as interoperability terminology alone with other standards. The NCIt content will be translated to French (it’s partially done), and the NCI licensing will be disclosed on the ANS multi-terminologies server and catalog.
• EVS, in collaboration with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and WHO’s Uppsala Monitoring Centre, contributed to the development and testing of a universal model for the ISO standard for the identification of medicinal products (IDMP) on a global scale. Implementation of this model is a part of the revision of ISO 11239/TS20440 and related IDMP standards.
• EVS subject matter experts created a “CDISC Controlled Terminology Advanced Topics” education course for clinical researchers. The course is focused on principles and the practice of controlled terminology as a basis of clinical data standards; it is designated for implementation in the framework of CDISC activities worldwide.