NCIT — NCI Thesaurus

Overview

The NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) is a reference terminology produced by the US National Cancer Institute covering the biomedical and clinical domains with particular depth in oncology, clinical trials, and biomedical research. According to NCI EVS, it covers approximately 120,000 key biomedical concepts as of 2024. It is widely used in clinical trial data management, cancer registries, and regulatory submissions. NCIt is used in CDISC clinical trial standards and is mapped in OMOP CDM vocabularies.

Key Concept Areas

NCIt covers diseases and conditions, anatomy, drugs and therapeutic agents, clinical trial concepts including study design and adverse event grades (via the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events, CTCAE), genes and molecular targets, and surgical and imaging procedures. Its coverage of oncology is particularly deep, making it the standard terminology for cancer registries and cancer clinical trial submissions.

Connections

• Aligns with: CDISC (SDTM controlled terminology source), ICD-O-3 (oncology cross-map)

Resources

• https://ncithesaurus.nci.nih.gov
• https://evs.nci.nih.gov (NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services)
• https://obofoundry.org/ontology/ncit.html (OBO Foundry entry)