The American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC), in partnership with the CDC, has created software in the form of a dynamic link library (DLL) to help cancer registries collect data on stage of disease for cancers according to the TNM system of the AJCC. Content from AJCC's Cancer Staging System has been licensed for use by NPCR registries. The TNM 9th edition staging library is intended to support the AJCC 9th edition standard and is applicable for diagnosis years 2021 and later.
For access to the licensed versions of this DLL, contact ajcc@facs.org.
Features
The Cancer Surveillance DLL has several primary functions:
- Identifies cancer schemas, i.e., chapter in the manual or disease, based on the diagnosis coded in ICD-O-3.
- Helps cancer data abstractors by providing cancer site-specific picklists of valid codes for the T, N, M, and stage groups, at the different points in the course of disease.
- Associates relevant cancer site-specific picklists of valid codes for site-specific data items (SSDIs), EOD, and Summary Stage 2018 tables with the selected schema.
The DLLs can be incorporated in cancer registry software programs to support standardized collection of TNM and other staging data.
Technical Information, Download, and Installation
The 9th edition of the Cancer Surveillance DLL has been implemented in both C++ and C# as 32-bit and 64-bit Windows DLLs.
C#
- The C# library requires the .NET Framework version 4.5 or higher to be installed.
- The C# library calls the C++ library to do its work. If the C# library is used, both libraries must be present in the same folder.
C++
- The C++ library comes with an interop wrapper for users who want to call the C++ library from .NET without using the C# library.
Both DLLs are included in the release package, along with documentation, code files and wrappers, and sample programs.
Underlying contents are incorporated from AJCC's API and from SEER*RSA. Each release of the Cancer Surveillance DLL has an assigned version (one for C++, one for C#), plus the version of AJCC and SEER RSA that was used in the build.
As of March 1, 2024:
- Current AJCC Cancer Surveillance DLL Version: 09.02.00.0003 (C++), 9.2.0.3 (C#)
- Current AJCC API version 02.02.02 (also referred to as 09.02.02 in software)
- Current SEER RSA content version: 3.1
Known Issues
None
