Evaluation of the Melanoma Tumor Burden Score (MTBS) in a real-world setting.

9565Background: Clinical cancer registration is increasingly important for healthcare delivery and outcome research in oncology. As compared to clinical trial data, information from clinical routine is often limited regarding the granularity and quality of measures for individual tumor load and distribution. Methods: In an effort to implement a robust and useful measure of tumor burden for patients with metastatic melanoma in a German national skin cancer registry (ADOReg) we evaluated the melanoma tumor burden score (MTBS), originally developed for analyzing chemotherapy data in melanoma patients. The MTBS contains a simple categorization of size, number an distribution of metastatic lesions in individual patients. It is aimed at being used on routine radiologic report allowing for a certain level of uncertainty and imprecise quantification of metastatic lesions. Basically, the lesions are categorized per affected organ with respect to number (solitary, few, multiple) and size (≤1cm, >1- 5cm, >5cm). For ...