Surgery Descriptions are missing information

Vocabulary Users
1

Hi all,

I’m mapping a cancer registry dataset to the OMOP Common Data Model and have encountered an issue with some of the surgery-related vocabulary concepts—specifically those tied to NAACCR Item 1290 (Surgical Procedure of Primary Site).

Some concept_name values appear to be incomplete or truncated. For example:

concept_id: 35917028  
concept_code: Breast@1290@48  
concept_name: Breast@Tissue

Based on NAACCR documentation, I believe the full description should be something like:

Total (simple) mastectomy; WITH removal of uninvolved contralateral breast; With reconstruction NOS; Tissue

I’ve noticed similar cases—for example, rows with concept codes like Breast@1290@## where the concept_name is simply "Implant", with no other surgical context.

I’m unsure whether:

  • These are placeholder or intermediate values I’m misinterpreting.
  • Or the concepts may have been loaded incorrectly, missing the full surgical description.

Has anyone else run into this issue? Any clarification on whether this is expected behavior—or how to handle it in mappings—would be greatly appreciated.

1 Like
2

Hello @arflierl!

Indeed, these concept names look corrupted.
Unfortunately, currently NAACCR is not on the roadmap and we don’t expect it to be refreshed in OMOP in the nearest future.
However, if you have a list of the correct concept names and a certain degree of inspiration, you can fill in the simple community contribution template and put it in a GitHub issue. So, we can easily fix the NAACCR concept names in the Aug 2025 release.

Best,
Masha

1 Like
3

@arflierl:

Welcome to the world of NAACCR. Is that the registry you are trying to convert? There is a good chunk of prior art your colleagues have accumulated. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Come to the Oncology Working Group or sign up for it and we can discuss.

That is correct. This is the full name of the value. It would be better to have that, rather than the abbreviation. We are engaged in a conversation with NAACCR to streamline all those things and create a proper terminology. This is one of the issues we want to tackle.

1 Like
4

I’m also working with NAACCR-coded data and ran into the same issue with truncated concept names. Good to know there’s active discussion happening around improving this. I’ll look into joining the Oncology Working Group; it sounds like it could save a lot of duplicated effort.

1 Like