Cancer staging is the process of determining the extent to which a
cancer has developed by spreading. Contemporary practice is to assign a number from I to IV to a cancer, with I being an isolated cancer and IV being a cancer which has spread to the limit of what the assessment measures. The stage generally takes into account the size of a
tumor, whether it has invaded adjacent
organs, how many regional (nearby)
lymph nodes it has spread to (if any), and whether it has appeared in more distant locations (
metastasized).