New York State Colorectal Cancer Data

The tumors have been categorized into four stages – stages I, II, III, and IV, where increasing numbers represent more severe disease. This staging system is known as the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system and is one of several staging systems currently in wide use, and lends itself to an analysis using the ordinal model. The stages are defined on the American Cancer website.

On the Colorectal Cancer Stages page, you will notice that aside from stage I, each stage contains several substages. These have been excluded from the data set in the interest of simplicity.

The data consists of 43,972 colorectal tumors diagnosed among New York State residents between 2010 and 2014 and reported to the New York State Cancer Registry, which is a part of the New York State Department of Health. The number of tumors by stage are as follows:

• Stage I: 10,910 (24.9%)
• Stage II: 11,920 (27.2%)
• Stage III: 12,147 (27.7%)
• Stage IV: 8,815 (20.1%)

The tumors have been grouped geographically into 952 groups of 46 tumors each. Each group has a single point location, which is the average location of the tumors in the group. The tumors in a group do not necessarily belong to the same county, city, zip code or any other geographic unit. This grouping method was chosen to protect patient confidentiality and to allow execution of SaTScan in a reasonable amount of time.