News

NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services published the latest updates to NCI Thesaurus, which includes data supporting osteosarcoma for the Pediatric Cancer Data Commons and a new value set containing COVID-19 vocabulary.

Updates to NCIt, NCIm, and other terminologies/ontologies have been published and are now available. These resources, managed and maintained by NCI CBIIT’s Enterprise Vocabulary Service Team, promote harmonization and shared data standards. This latest update includes new data terms for the Pediatric Cancer Data Commons and the Integrated Canine Data Commons.

CBIIT Director, Dr. Tony Kerlavage, sat down recently for a podcast examining the evolution of NCI’s Data Commons. He tracked the development of the Cancer Research Data Commons, from its early pilots to today’s cloud-based infrastructure, with repositories of diverse data and more than 1,000 tools and resources.

Check out the latest quarterly updates made to terminologies and ontologies developed and maintained by NCI’s Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS) including the NCI Thesaurus and the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium’s (CDISC’s) controlled terminology. EVS content developed in collaboration with CDISC, FDA, NCI programs, and other stakeholders is an indispensable component of NCI’s informatics infrastructure. EVS not only plays a critical role in federal and global data standards but also provides services to accurately code, analyze, and share cancer and biomedical research.

In a recent podcast, NCI leaders from CBIIT and the Small Business Innovation Research Development Center shared how technological developments have enhanced cancer research and have helped usher in new diagnostics, treatments, and patient care.

The new terminology for female reproductive neoplasms in NCI’s Thesaurus aligns with the latest World Health Organization standards. Other updates support CDISC’s standards and are intended to further facilitate the collection, management, and analysis of research data from human clinical trials and other studies.

Staff from CBIIT and NCI, alongside partners from NIH, FDA, and a consortium of scientists from across the world, joined forces to create reference samples and data call sets to help the cancer community further decipher cancer-related gene mutations. Their findings were recently published in Nature Biotechnology.

The latest terminology additions and changes have now been completed in NCI Thesaurus to support CDISC’s Study Data Tabulation Model and implementation guide, a standard model for submitting data from human clinical trials.

Cancer researchers and data scientists can extract terms from the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) and generate reports to show how those terms align with other standardized vocabularies with NCI’s new Report Exporter application.

Find terms from the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) to include in your cancer research study, or learn what that term means for your data analysis, with a new browser, called EVS Explore. This tool builds on existing functionality available through the EVS Application Programming Interface and offers cancer researchers and data scientists a new, faster option for searching NCIt’s standardized cancer data.