Cancer InFocus
Cancer InFocus is a software platform that automates the gathering and visualization of publicly available data relating to cancer incidence and mortality and thereby facilitates better understanding of cancer burden within the catchment area of an NCI-designated cancer center. (1) This platform was developed by the Community Impact Office at the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center and made available to the Karmanos Cancer Institute (KCI) and other cancer centers via a no-cost licensing agreement for access to data gathering and application creation code.
The data gathering program for Cancer InFocus, also known as CIFTools, receives a set of geographic units (e.g., a list of counties) as an input and uses that input to pull and filter data from several publicly available online data sources, including but not limited to the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), CDC Places, and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Certified Mammography facility list. CIFTools then processes the collected data into a standard format, organized by category (e.g., sociodemographics, screening, housing and transportation) and geographic level (e.g., county-level, census tract-level), and written to files for use.
Within the KCI Cancer InFocus platform, users can explore cancer outcomes across the KCI catchment area, including age-adjusted incidence and mortality rates, and cancer-related determinants at three geographic-levels in Eastern Michigan: census tract, county, and the five KCI catchment area regions (i.e., North, East, Center, Southeast excluding Detroit, and Detroit).
References
- (1) Burus JT, Park L, McAfee CR, Wilhite NP, Hull PC. Cancer InFocus: Tools for Cancer Center Catchment Area Geographic Data Collection and Visualization. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2023;32(7):OF1-OF5.
County data
County, census tract, and KCI catchment region data: Univariate
County data: Bivariate