NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS)

Terminology plays an important role in NCI's research, clinical, and information efforts. NCI is working with many partners to create and publish controlled terminology that can help develop and communicate information useful to scientists, clinicians, patients, and the public. Here are some key resources.

NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS)
NCI EVS provides services and resources, including NCI Thesaurus and NCI Metathesaurus, that facilitate the use and standardization of terminology across the Institute and the larger biomedical community.

• NCI Thesaurus
  Published monthly by NCI, this reference terminology and biomedical ontology is used in a growing number of NCI and other systems. It covers more than 100,000 concepts used in the coding of clinical care, translational and basic research, and public information and administrative activities. The NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) provides definitions, synonyms, and other information on more than 10,000 cancers and related diseases, 17,000 single agents and related substances, combination therapies, a federal Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) standard anatomy section, and a wide range of other topics related to cancer and biomedical research. It is maintained by a multidisciplinary team of editors, who add about 700 new entries each month.
• NCI Metathesaurus
  The NCI Metathesaurus (NCIm) is a comprehensive biomedical terminology database that contains 2,000,000 concepts mapped to 4,000,000 terms with 22,000,000 relationships. NCI Metathesaurus contains most terminologies used by NCI for clinical care, translational and basic research, and public information and administrative activities, including most public domain terminologies from the National Library of Medicine's UMLS Metathesaurus as well as a growing number of other cancer-related and biomedical terminologies.
• NCI Term Browser
  All terminologies hosted by NCI EVS can be viewed and searched in an integrated environment. NCI Term Browser provides access to ICD-9-CM, ICD-10-CM, the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE), the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA), the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), the National Drug File Reference Terminology (NDF-RT), the Gene Ontology (GO), and many other terminologies and ontologies used by NCI and its partners. Cross-terminology mappings and more than 500 terminology value set coding standards are also provided.