BRIDG & NCI

The US National Cancer Institute has been heavily involved in the BRIDG project from the early days through to the present. The NCI has sponsored much of the development of the model and contributed semantics from numerous projects as well as provided leadership to the governing bodies (the steering committee and modeling team). NCI provides model maintenance and hosting of the BRIDG website. The late Dr. Ed Helton (NCI), along with Mary Ann Slack (FDA), was instrumental in the creation of the HL7 BRIDG Work Group and the subsequent merger with the Regulated Clinical Research Information Management (RCRIM) Work Group to form the current HL7 Biomedical Research and Regulation (BR&R) Work Group. NCI continues to be a primary driver of the model enhancements including current plans to leverage BRIDG in NCI's Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR) to provide the backbone conceptual semantics for harmonizing CDEs. Recent harmonization projects have also included:

• National Biomedical Imaging Archive (NBIA)
• DICOM’s Structured Report for breast cancer (TID 1500) and supporting modules from supplement 121
• IHE’s Anatomic Pathology Structured Report (APSR) v2.1
• HL7 Specimen Domain Analysis Model (DAM) r1
• Annotations and Image Markup (AIM) v4 rv48
• Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) release 2015

BRIDG is loaded in NCI's publicly available caDSR as a set of high level conceptual/semantic entities with placeholder CDEs based on generic data types to support cross project harmonization. Additionally, tags for the elements of the models above are attached to the BRIDG Common Data Elements (CDEs) in NCI's caDSR.