Children's Oncology Group

The Children's Oncology Group (COG) is a worldwide clinical trial cooperative group supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and fashioned with the mission of studying childhood cancers. It was formed in 2000 with the merging of four independent cooperative groups; the Children's Cancer Study Group (CCG), Pediatric Oncology Group (POG), Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study Group (IRS), and the National Wilms Tumor Study Group (NWTS). This merger has seen its fair share of problems, especially with regard to integrating the various databases associated with each individual cooperative group. One such initiative to consolidate these databases involves caBIG or the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, which is guided and supported by the NCI in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Quality Assurance

The Children's Oncology Group has all of its protocol driven cases reviewed at the Quality Assurance Review Center (QARC). As mandated by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), every radiotherapy department participating in a COG study must submit their data to QARC for review. QARC is located in Providence, Rhode Island and reviews thousands of cases per year. The center was founded in 1977 as a not-for-profit healthcare organization designed to provide quality assurance for CALGB studies. Radiotherapy data from around one-thousand hospitals in both the United States and abroad is reviewed and archived at QARC.

Another center for quality assurance is the Radiological Physics Center (RPC) in Houston, Texas. The primary responsibility of the RPC is to assure the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and its cooperative groups like COG that all participating institutions are following the guidelines set-forth for the physics-related aspects of radiotherapy. Established in 1968, the RPC has consistently received funding from the NCI in order to perform the aforementioned mission.