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Summary
This document describes the initial public release of the TCIA programmatic Interface or REST API implementation. This API is designed for use by developers of image analysis and data mining tools to directly query the public resources of TCIA and retrieve information into their applications. The API complements the existing web interface but eliminates the need for users to visit the TCIA web pages to select and download images then upload them into their viewing and analysis applications. The TCIA Programmatic Interface is based on a middleware platform called Project Bindaas, developed by Emory University and uses REST web service technologies.
The API is a RESTful interface, accessed through web URLs. There is no software that an application developer needs to download in order to use the API. The application developer can build their own access routines using just the API documentation provided. Coding examples can be found on github: https://github.com/nadirsaghar/TCIA-REST-API-Client. The The interface employs a set of predefined query functions (see REST API Directory) that access TCIA databases.
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Your software that uses the programmatic interface requires an API-KEY. In this version of the programmatic interface, the API-KEY is used to identify the software application. You can obtain one API-KEY and use that for your application; you do not need a separate API-KEY for each user of your software.. To obtain an API-Key please send a request to help@cancerimagingarchive.net or contact TCIA's help desk by phone at: +1 314-747-4254. Please see the coding examples in github: https://github.com/nadirsaghar/TCIA-REST-API-Client for guidance on how to incorporate the API-Key into your code. Once you have acquired an API-Key you will need to implement a minimal amount of software in your application to invoke the REST API.
REST API URL and Format
The full API consists of a base URL followed by the api and the query parameters in that order.
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