Background There are a variety of ways to quantify cancer survival with each measure having advantages and disadvantages. For example, relative/net survival is useful for making fair comparisons between population groups and over time, but is of less relevance to clinicians or patients. The differences between the various measures and how they should be interpreted has led to confusion among scientists, the media, health care professionals and patients. Purpose and methods. We have developed an online interactive tool to help improve the understanding of a variety of cancer survival measures and how these vary between patients. Its primary purpose is to function as an aid in the interpretation of a variety of commonly reported, important and more complex cancer survival measures that are available from fitting statistical models. The interpretation is facilitated through the use of dynamic interactive graphics available using an online interactive tool. The interactivity improves understanding of these measures and how survival or mortality may vary by age and sex. Routine measures of cancer survival are reported, such as net and all-cause survival. In addition, individualised estimates using crude probabilities are often more appropriate for patients or health care professionals. The results are presented in a variety of ways, including graphs, “people charts”, tables and descriptive text using natural frequencies. All results are updated immediately when using drag bars, drop-down menus or radio buttons. This immediate feedback together with the simple text descriptions leads to both better understanding of individual risk and the differences between the various measures. Results and conclusion The online tool is in final testing using English data for a range of cancer sites. The tool is available at www.interpret.le.ac.uk. We have plans to further develop the interactive tool by incorporating data from different countries and from statistical models that incorporate more disease characteristics (e.g. stage, grade and tumour size).

The Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR), along with the Louisiana Colorectal Cancer Roundtable and geospatial experts from NCI, Westat, and Temple University, collaborated to map colorectal cancer in Louisiana to support the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable’s “80% by 2018” initiative. The overall goal of the project was to use multiple data sources and geospatial analyses in order to identify the places and high-risk populations who may benefit the most from screening interventions. Through this webinar, the LTR will share its experiences with address cleaning and geospatial analyses, as well as present the resulting maps and implications for screening in Louisiana.

This webinar is part of a series sponsored by the Research & Data Use Steering Committee. The idea is to bring high quality presentations that were presented during the annual conference to a wider audience via webinar. If you have seen a presentation at the annual conference, or elsewhere, that you feel would benefit the larger NAACCR community, please suggest it be presented in this forum.