The goal of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to advance surveillance science by supporting the development of new and innovative tools and methods for more efficient, detailed, timely, and accurate data collection by cancer registries. Specifically, the FOA solicits applications for projects to develop, adapt, apply, scale-up, and validate tools and methods to improve the collection and integration of cancer registry data to expand the data items collected. Applications proposed must be based on partnership with at a minimum of two U.S. population-based central cancer registries. Tools and methods proposed for development are expected to enhance the registry core infrastructure and, in so doing, expand the usefulness of registry-collected data to support high-quality cancer research.
The scientific scope of this FOA includes but is not limited to
- Development, validation, evaluation of scalable tools/methods to facilitate automatic/unsupervised extraction and cosolidation of specific data from various types of unstructured medical records as for example, pathology reports, diagnostic imaging, laboratory, hospital discharge forms and clinical visits;
- Supplementation of cancer registries with new or more detailed data items, from existing data sources or from linkages with novel data sources, e.g. electronic medical records (EMR)
Funds will be made available through the U01 cooperative agreement award mechanism.
Deadlines:
- Letter of Intent Due Date(s): 30 days prior to the application due date
- Application Due Date(s): November 18, 2020; June 6, 2021; November 18, 2021; June 6, 2022; November 18, 2022; June 6, 2023
​PAR-20-170 Expiration Date June 07, 2023
Research Area 1: Natural Language Processing (NLP) or machine learning methods/tools or other methods/tools to facilitate automatic/unsupervised/minimally supervised extraction and consolidation of specific discrete cancer-related data from various types of unstructured medical records.
Research Area 2: Development of approaches for optimized integration of cancer registry with various types of medical data (e.g., different insurance programs, national surveys, infectious disease surveillance systems, clinical trials network) or for obtaining ongoing prospective reporting stream of data that can become part of the cancer registry data flow (e.g., electronic health records [EHR] system, genomic labs, pharmacy).