Improving the quality of cancer staging.

The author discusses efforts of American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) to improve the quality of cancer staging. Topics discussed include its collaboration with Union for International Cancer Control to provide unified anatomic staging system for cancer worldwide, the vital role of registrars in the collection of cancer data and a study commissioned by the AJCC which examined the quality of existing cancer prognostic calculators and highlighted the poor quality of existing prognostic tools.