The Nirmiti application: An innovative tool for extending CanReg5 analyses to cancer mortality and paediatric cancer

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Regional Hub in Mumbai provides technical support to population-based cancer registries (PBCRs) in South and South-East Asian (SSEA) countries. For data management and incidence rate table generation, the Hub recommends CanReg5, an open-source registry software developed by IARC, to all PBCRs seeking support from it. However, CanReg5 is limited in generating mortality and paediatric cancer incidence tables. Several SSEA cancer registries requested the Hub to develop practical solutions to facilitate the generation of cancer rates statistics. The IARC Regional Hub, in Mumbai, subsequently developed Nirmiti, an innovative web application which is capable of generating incidence, mortality, and paediatric cancer rates based on provided input data. The application accepts registry data in a specific format and generates required tables according to the selected options; users can input data from CanReg5 or other software into Nirmiti for processing. Nirmiti generates childhood cancer rates for age-groups 0-14 and 0-19, based on the 12 main groups and 47 subgroups of the International Incidence of Childhood Cancer, Volume 3, and is freely available to cancer registries upon request. The application has been successfully utilized by PBCRs in India, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan.