GIS Resources

GIS Resources

Resources for Calculating Rates for Small areas and by ABSMs

This section contains the materials an analyst needs to calculate small area rates or rates by area-based social measures, such as NAACCR Poverty Code, These resources will aid registries in creating local SEER*Stat databases at census tract -level of geography (or at census tract-level aggregations, such as the NAACCR/NCI Cancer Reporting Zones.

A January 2023 NAACCR Talk training webinar was presented teach users how to create a local SEER*Stat database using census tract 2010 geography as well as how to calculate cancer incidence rates by census tract and by census tract-level area-based social measures (ABSM), such NAACCR Poverty Code. The resources here are an update to the April 2022 NAACCR Talk.

A Coordinated Session was presented at the NAACCR 2021 Summer Forum: Denominators for Small Area Analysis, Tackling the Intractable Problem of Tract-level Analysis.
These talks discuss the newly developed NCI/Woods & Poole census tract population estimates now available for all states. Slides are available below.

Below are three sections of SAS code that will assist registries in creating their SEER*Stat database as well as the Base NAACCR Dictionary. Please be sure to review the April 2022 Training Webinar as well as read all instructions in each SAS Program before running it.

Get Census Tract-Level Population Data, including Tract-level ABSM

For any questions or issues with these resources, please contact Dr. Recinda Sherman, Program Manager of Data Use & Research.

GIS Resources

The committee formally known as the GIS Committee is now GSADD (Geographic, Spatial and Demographic Data) Workgroup. Materials on this page have been developed by members of this committee.

Street address and county location at diagnosis are characteristically critically important elements for GIS mapping and analysis. Correct and complete geocoding to coordinate point locations (e.g., latitude/longitude) and standard data analysis areas (e.g., census tract and block) are a function of valid input in these standard NAACCR abstract fields.

The Wisconsin Cancer Reporting System has purchased licensing from the United States Postal Service (USPS) to access USA-wide zip code and street address Data (including County FIPS for addresses.) Using this authoritative reference data, the current validity of individual address zip codes, city/locality names, and county locations can be validated individually and in combination. These records can be used as visual job aids for abstractors as well as validation templates for automated edits in the field or at the central cancer registry.

The NAACCR GIS Committee has created a data table of commonly used demographic and socio-economic variables at the census tract level from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). Most variables are given as percentages of the population to facilitate geographic comparisons. ACS tract-level data are from 5-year periods and covers all of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The data file downloads contain the tract data table in both SAS and MS Access format, a data dictionary, and a summary report. The SAS code library used to create the data tables is also available and includes a Word file describing the steps in the process.

Note: Updated SAS codes for ACS census tract-level data and urban/rural census tract-level data are available on the NAACCR Call for Data Website under the Certification Tab.

The GIS Committee, working with a consultant, Luc Anselin, PhD of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, selected four spatial analysis software packages to be reviewed based on the following criteria: 1) they were free and/or open source, 2) they were up-to-date and under active development, 3) they came with a manual and documentation, 4) they were downloadable from the Internet, and 5) they worked within a Microsoft Windows operating system. This report, was accepted by the NAACCR Board of Directors on August 18, 2004.

Due to a partnership between NAACCR, Texas A&M University, and the National Cancer Institute, NAACCR members have access to a single, uniform geocoding platform for open use by all NAACCR Full Member Registries. This system, Automated Geospatial Geocoding Interface Environment or AGGIE, system is accessible through your MyNAACCR log-in. The NAACCR AGGIE Geocoder is also integrated within the SEER DMS registry software package.

To access, first log-on to MyNAACCR.

There are resources on this page to assist with geocoding. For personal assistance or technical issues, please contact Dr. Recinda Sherman at .

This Guide was authored by Daniel W. Goldberg of the University of Southern California (USC) GIS Research Laboratory, with expert input and guidance from members of the NAACCR GIS Committee. The Guide serves to centralize much of the available research and practice scholarship on these topics to provide a single, comprehensive perspective on all aspects of geocoding. Geocoding, for example, may involve the process of assigning latitude and longitude coordinates to street addresses.

The Guide is designed for a variety of users, including cancer registry staff who design geocoding systems, those who geocode cancer data, and researchers who use these data for public health research and practice. Dr. John Wilson, Director of the USC GIS Research Laboratory, notes that the Best Practices Guide “will serve as a rich reference manual for anyone who wants to inject more science and less art (uncertainty) into their geocoding tasks.

This document defines the data items generated the by the NAACCR Geocoder during the batch database geocoding process.

In addition to the materials below, NAACCR is available to individually assist registries with issues related to geocoding and use of the NAACCR Geocoder.

The hardest part of geocoding is the manual review and correction of “bad” geocodes. be manually touched to make them better. They failed to geocode well because they were hard and it may take a human with eyeballs to see why. Our NAACCR MI GeoCorrect Tool interface allows you to tear through your geocoded data at lightning speed, whipping those naughty geocodes into high quality data.

MI GeoCorrect Tool Tutorial

Suggested citation: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) downloadable file from here July, 2015. Per Michigan State University Libraries (http://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=96245&p=626239) and accessed via by.

This program was created by the New York State Cancer Registry. The program takes output from SaTScan and reformats it for Google Earth. The user needs to have python installed, freely available from www.python.org. In addition, this program also requires EasyGUI to be placed in the same folder as Python (EasyGUI Download). Please note, this function has also been incorporated into the current SaTScan version.

If you have any questions, please contact Recinda Sherman at .

The NAACCR Shortest Path Finder Tool is a web-based software application for the processing of research data sets to allow time and distance comparisons of routes utilizing road networks. It is more precise for calculating the distance and travel time between two points than the Great Circle Distance Calculator. For more information and to access this NAACCR-hosted application, please select the link below.

This SAS code calculates the great circle distance between the locations of cases at the time of diagnosis and the locations of treatment facilities. Case locations are taken from NAACCR items 2352 (latitude) and 2354 (longitude) in a NAACCR v10 or v11 record layout file. The program can use either source (unconsolidated) or consolidated case records as input. A second input file contains facility IDs, latitude, and longitude.

The NAACCR GIS Committee has compiled a list of geographic information systems-related web sites that can be used for educational purposes. Click the link below to download this list. Special thanks to David O’Brien from the Alaska Cancer Registry for coordinating the recent updates to this document.

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