Childhood Cancer Data Initiative Annual Symposium (Abstract Registration): Submission #68

Submission information
Submission Number: 68
Submission ID: 191336
Submission UUID: 92495c86-9343-446a-9541-ca2af51a2393

Created: Tue, 08/18/2026 - 20:01
Completed: Tue, 08/18/2026 - 20:07
Changed: Tue, 08/18/2026 - 20:07

Remote IP address: 10.208.28.32
Submitted by: Anonymous
Language: English

Is draft: No
Abstract Submission for Poster Presentation
Hybrid Semantic–Lexical Retrieval for Source-to-CDE Mapping in the NCI caDSR
Accurate mapping of source data elements to standardized common data elements (CDEs) is essential for biomedical data integration, but short, abbreviated, and heterogeneous source descriptions make both lexical and semantic matching unreliable. We constructed a benchmark of approximately 69,000 expert-linked source-to-CDE mappings from the National Cancer Institute’s caDSR and used it to evaluate bi-encoders, text representations, and two-stage fine-tuning. We then developed a hybrid system that combines semantic retrieval, CDE Match-inspired keyword retrieval, cross-encoder scoring, and supervised reranking. Across an internal test set and five distribution-shifted holdouts, the system achieved Recall@5 of 0.971 internally and 0.802–0.972 externally. It achieved the highest Recall@5 among evaluated methods on five of six datasets; on GDC, performance was near ceiling at 70/72, within one query of the official NCI CDE Match service and its Python approximation at 71/72.
  1. First Name: James
    Middle Initial: H
    Last Name: Tanis
    Degree(s): Ph.D.
    Organization: NCI
  2. First Name: Denise
    Middle Initial: B
    Last Name: Warzel
    Degree(s): M.Sc.
    Organization: NCI
  3. First Name: Rakesh
    Last Name: Khanna
    Degree(s): B.S.
    Organization: NCI
  4. First Name: Qingrong
    Last Name: Chen
    Degree(s): Ph.D.
    Organization: NCI
  5. First Name: Chunhua
    Last Name: Yan
    Degree(s): Ph.D.
    Organization: NCI
  6. First Name: Ravi
    Last Name: Valleleth
    Degree(s): B.S.
    Organization: NCI
  7. First Name: Matthew
    Middle Initial: T
    Last Name: Nash
    Degree(s): B.S.
    Organization: NCI
  8. First Name: Deepali
    Last Name: Manathara
    Degree(s): B.S.
    Organization: NCI
  9. First Name: Bradley
    Middle Initial: B
    Last Name: Biggers
    Degree(s): B.S.
    Organization: NCI
  10. First Name: Joyce
    Middle Initial: B
    Last Name: Soares
    Degree(s): M.Sc.
    Organization: NCI
  11. First Name: Daoud
    Last Name: Meerzaman
    Degree(s): Ph.D.
    Organization: NCI
James H Tanis
NCI