Toward Precision Cancer Surveillance Blog

This blog features initiatives that the Surveillance Research Program (SRP) is spearheading to bring the nation closer to a complete and detailed understanding of the cancer burden. The blog's commentaries report on key collaborations and other efforts that aim to build an increasingly powerful and useful cancer surveillance infrastructure. We also highlight methods and technologies that are and will be essential for rapidly collecting, analyzing, interpreting, sharing, and applying cancer surveillance data.

SEER 50th Anniversary

September 18, 2023

2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program. The population coverage of SEER has grown over time and the Program now comprises 22 registries.

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Cancer Trends Progress Report: April 2022 Publication

October 3, 2022

The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) 20th anniversary edition of the Cancer Trends Progress Report (CTPR) is now available to the public. The CTPR includes US cancer trends and control measures regarding cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, life after diagnosis, and end of life.

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Cancer Trends Progress Report: Fall 2020 Updates

January 29, 2021

In November 2020, NCI’s Cancer Trends Progress Report (CTPR), an online summary of trends in US cancer control measures, was updated with new incidence and mortality data from the NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program and Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

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Cancer Trends Progress Report: 2020 Updates

April 30, 2020

The National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences is pleased to announce the newly updated Cancer Trends Progress Report (CTPR), an online summary of trends in US cancer control measures.

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NCI-DOE Hackathon

February 6, 2020

The National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program is collaborating with the Department of Energy (DOE) on a 5-year pilot project that focuses on the use of high-performance computing to support cancer surveillance.

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Quality Improvement Experts Face-to-Face (QIE F2F) Meeting

September 4, 2019

The NCI Surveillance Research Program’s Quality Improvement Experts (QIE) team hosted its annual QIE Face-to-Face (F2F) meeting at the NCI Shady Grove campus on August 14-15, 2019.

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Summary of the 2018 SEER*DMS Face-to-Face Meeting

February 15, 2019

The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) held its annual SEER Data Management System (SEER*DMS) Face-to-Face (F2F) Meeting on September 26-28, 2018.

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Introducing the NCI Tobacco Policy Viewer – A geo-view into historical patterns of smoke-free policy coverage in the U.S.

August 7, 2018

The NCI Tobacco Policy Viewer is an interactive online resource for the mapping, querying, and downloading of historical smoke-free policy data in the United States. The tool reveals variation across U.S. cities, counties, and states by the types of indoor areas that are smoke-free, length of time since the smoke-free policy came into effect, and number of people who are protected by the policy.

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Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer – 2018

June 5, 2018

The Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer (ARN) is a collaborative update from the National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. It provides the most recent cancer data on rates of new cases, death rates, and trends for the most common cancers in the United States.

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Cancer Trends Progress Report 2018

February 28, 2018

Cancer is a major public health concern that affects more than 1.6 million Americans each year. It is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Although the cancer death (mortality) rate continues to decline across all populations, certain groups suffer a greater burden of disease, and the financial and emotional hardships caused by a cancer diagnosis persist.

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Summary of the 2017 SEER*DMS Face-to-Face Meeting

November 28, 2017

On July 12-14, 2017, the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Data Management System (SEER*DMS) 2017 Face-to-Face Meeting took place in Rockville, MD, at the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Shady Grove campus. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss enhancements to SEER*DMS and updates to SEER Program initiatives.

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Did You Know? Video Series

October 20, 2017

Cancer is a major health burden, with an estimated 1,688,780 new diagnoses in 2017. Between the difficulty of receiving a cancer diagnosis and the complexity of cancer data, patients and loved ones may have difficulty interpreting cancer information. The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) “Did You Know?” video series breaks down cancer statistics in layman’s terms and includes easy-to-understand charts and graphs.

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Integrating genomics into population-based cancer surveillance in the era of precision medicine

September 19, 2017

Population-based cancer surveillance provides a quantitative measurement of cancer occurrence in the United States and globally. Core activities of surveillance include measuring cancer incidence and characterizing each cancer with regard to histopathology, stage, and treatment in the context of survival. Cancer surveillance has been crucial in informing policy and practice, as well as clinical and public health efforts to reduce the cancer burden.

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NCI/DOE Pilot 3 Collaboration (Spring 2017 Update)

June 5, 2017

An integrated team from NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program, four Department of Energy (DOE) labs—Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, and Argonne National Lab—Information Management Systems (IMS), and four SEER registries met on March 28th–30th, 2017 to continue their work on the NCI-DOE Pilot 3 collaboration.

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Natural Language Processing to Support Cancer Surveillance

December 5, 2016

The acquisition of diagnostic, treatment, and outcomes information on cancer cases for population-based cancer surveillance currently involves a tremendous amount of manual data abstraction and information processing by expert staff. A majority (estimated 65%) of clinical data elements that are needed to characterize cancer patients come from unstructured sources (e.g. pathology reports, radiology notes, treatment summaries, clinical visit notes).

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Collaboration with the Department of Energy

October 18, 2016

NCI is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the inter-agency coordination activities defined in the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) Presidential Order (July 29, 2015) and announced during Vice President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Summit on June 29, 2016. The NCI-DOE collaboration has initiated three pilot efforts that will simultaneously impact the future of cancer research and guide future advances in scientific computing.

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Last Updated: 12 Mar, 2024