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NIH
U.S. National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute

Collaborative Stage

Collaborative Stage is a unified data collection system designed to provide a common data set to meet the needs of all three staging systems: TNM, SEER Extent of Disease (EOD), and SEER Summary Stage (SS). It provides a comprehensive system to improve data quality by standardizing rules for timing, clinical and pathologic assessments, and compatibility across all of the systems for all cancer sites. The Collaborative Stage project is sponsored by the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) in collaboration with several standard-setting organizations, including the SEER Program. The SEER Program has developed training resources and software related to the implementation of Collaborative Staging in cancer registries.