Methods

Cancer registries will submit their data to CONCORD according to a well-defined submission protocol before the end of 2012. The data will then be cleaned, validated, and analysed in a standard way, under guidance from the steering group.

The 3 main analytical tasks are:

1. The estimation of population-based life-tables that match each cancer registration population to adjust for differing background mortality. Various smoothing-techniques will be employed to standardize life-tables particularly as different regions may lack population estimates in every calendar year, or in all single year age groups up to age 99.
2. The estimation of net survival using a modeling technique that minimizes biases known to occur in direct estimation techniques, such as relative survival.
3. The use of data imputation techniques to handle significant proportions of missing stage data when analyzing stage-specific net survival.

‌

‌

‌