Research Areas

SRP funds or participates in several diverse research areas that pertain to the measurement of cancer incidence, morbidity, survival, and mortality.

Subpopulations: Data, Statistics, & Tools

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

A central source of information about GIS and related resources for use by the public, cancer researchers, and the GIS Special Interest Group.

Health Drivers

Data, statistics, and tools to support research on the burden of cancer among Americans.

NCI supports several projects that focus on cancer among Native American populations. These include reports and websites summarizing the cancer burden among American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people, SEER Program registries that provide up-to-date cancer data for AI/AN, and funding opportunities focused on intervention research to improve Native American health.

Cancer Surveillance Informatics & Data Linkages

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

SRP has initiated pilot studies to evaluate a variety of NLP tools for extraction of information from pathology reports and other clinical documents. These pilots are part of broader goals to enhance cancer surveillance through NLP facilitated case abstraction, to conduct large scale quality assessments of SEER data, and to acquire more detailed diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes data for research.

SEER-Linked Virtual Tissue Repository (VTR)

The VTR Pilot Study tested the feasibility of a SEER-Linked VTR Program and compared SEER breast and pancreatic cancer cases that had highly unique survival to pair-matched cases that had customary survival. Initial findings were published in the SEER 50th anniversary issue of JNCI Monographs.

The SEER-Linked VTR Program was launched in November 2024. SEER VTR registries act as the honest brokers to provide de-identified, linked, archival tissue and data to investigators for secondary use in cancer research.

Virtual Pooled Registry-Cancer Linkage System (VPR-CLS) Project

A system to provide researchers with initial match counts and to minimize redundancy in reviews currently needed in state-by-state applications.

Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program

Authoritative source of information on cancer incidence and survival in the U.S. Routinely collects data on patient demographics, primary tumor site, tumor morphology and stage at diagnosis, first course of treatment, and follow-up for vital status.

Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET)

A consortium of NCI-sponsored investigators that use statistical modeling to improve our understanding of cancer control interventions and their effects on cancer incidence and mortality.

Cancer Prevalence and Cost of Care Projections

SRP supports research into population–based estimates and projections of the overall and site-specific cancer-attributable medical care costs in the United States.