NCIT

NCIT stands for the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus, a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for cancer research and clinical oncology. Developed and maintained by the United States National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), NCIT provides standardized terms and definitions for anatomy, pathology, drugs, procedures, and other clinical concepts related to cancer. It is used to facilitate data integration, retrieval, and computational analysis across biomedical databases, electronic health records, and research studies.

The thesaurus is structured as an ontology, linking terms through hierarchical (is-a) and associative (has-part, associated-with) relationships. Each entry includes a unique accession code (e.g., C34949), a preferred name, synonyms, and cross-references to other classification systems such as ICD-10, SNOMED CT, and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). NCIT is stored in the NCI Thesaurus data model, which supports both legacy and current terminology while allowing for backward compatibility through versioning.

NCIT is freely available through the NCI’s Gene Ontology (NCBI) website and can be downloaded in OBO or RDF formats. The resource is updated regularly, with releases typically occurring every three to six months. Users can contribute new terms or changes via the NCI Term Request Service, which undergoes expert review before inclusion.

Key applications of NCIT include mapping clinical trial data to uniform disease classifications, supporting genomic variant annotation, and enabling semantic interoperability among cancer registries. Because it is open source, NCIT is widely adopted by research consortia and healthcare organizations worldwide, contributing to improved data quality and interoperability in cancer informatics.