[Some thoughts on cancer registry in China: in the era of big data and informatization]

Cancer is a major disease threatening the people's health in China. Cancer registry is the ground work of the development and evaluation of cancer prevention and control policies. Cancer registry in China started in 1950s. During the last 60 years, a nationwide cancer surveillance and follow-up network has been developed. All cancer registries covered about 31.51% population of the national population in 2017. However, there are still some problems in the present work in the aspects of the number and distribution of cancer registries, the depth and width of registry data, the timeliness and accessibility of registry data. The advent of the big data and informatization era provides a clear direction for the future of cancer registry. In the next decade, standardizing cancer registry workflow, constructing cancer big data, improving data sharing mechanism and realizing real-time reporting, dynamic monitoring and multi-dimensional presenting of cancer registry data using latest information technologies will be the core methods to solve the problems we are facing now.