Annotating Taiwan cancer registry to caDSR for international interoperability

It is very difficult to exchange and integrate the data among different cancer institutions, in order to discover useful biomedical information for the cancer community. We developed a cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid ^TM (caBIG ^TM) Silver level compliant cancer registry database system, called the gridTCR (grid of the Taiwan Cancer Registry), which integrates the demographic data, clinical history, pathology data, and clinical outcome data including treatment, recurrence and vital status from cancer registry databases in Taiwan. In this manuscript, we will be developing the common data elements using vocabulary standards, ontology and semantic modeling methodology. The Taiwan Cancer Common Data Element Project (TCCDEP) developed 40 data elements to annotate the cancer registry data collected. The aim of this project is to creat a core set of data elements for annotating the cancer registry data and achieve the interoperability over the caBIG community. We describe the process required to develop the model, the caDSR CDEs, and the results of the modeling effort. We address difficulties we encountered and modifications for solution. Currently, the Taiwan cancer registry CDEs are released and available in CDE browser for reusing. Furthermore, we will extend our CDEs to daily clinical practice and trials, along with how the methods were used to fully implemented in hospitals and cancer research centers in Taiwan.