Page History

Background

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TCGA began in 2006 as a three-year pilot jointly sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and National Human Genome Research Institute. The TCGA pilot project (focused initially on glioblastoma, ovary, and lung cancers) confirmed that an atlas of genomic changes could be constructed for specific cancer types. It also showed that a national network of research and technology teams working on related projects could pool their efforts, create an economy of scale and develop an infrastructure for making the data publicly accessible. Importantly, it proved that making the data freely available would enable distributed researchers across the world to make and validate important discoveries. The success of that pilot led the National Institutes of Health to commit major new resources to TCGA to collect and characterize more than 20 additional tumor types.  All of the data is made freely accessible for researchers to download via their  TCGA Data Portal.

As an opportunity to leverage that wealth of new biomedical knowledge, CIP committed substantial effort to gather and place the clinical diagnostic images that match the genomically analyzed TCGA tissue cases in The Cancer Imaging Archive. CIP encouraged an ad hoc image research team to study glioblastoma. The Cancer Imaging Archive now contains a TCGA GBM collection with images from more than 200 subjects whose molecular and clinical patient data can be accessed in the TCGA Data Portal. A multi-institutional team coordinated by Dr Adam Flanders of Thomas Jefferson University assembled researchers from across the country to create the TCGA Glioma Phenotype Research Group. In less than a year's time they have quickly demonstrated the advantages of such scientific collaboration by their rapid scientific progress with a number of publications and abstracts presented and in the pipeline for future venues.Presently, CIP is developing to TCIA. CIP has developed agreements with many of the TCGA Tissue Site Source institutions to recover and place in the Image Archive collections of diagnostic images that match the genomic data now being deposited in the publically accessible TCGA Data Portal on cancers of the brain (GBM/LGG), breast (BRCA), renal (KIRC), lung (LUAD), and in due time, collect many of the future 20-plus tumors cancer types that TCGA will characterize as the program moves forwardhas analyzed.  Imaging Source Site (ISS) Groups are being created and governed by participants from institutions that have provided imaging data to the archive for a given cancer type. Modeled after TCGA analysis groups, these groups ISS Groups are given the opportunity to publish a marker paper for a given cancer type per as outlined in the aforementioned publication policy. It is hoped that this will generate publication policies outlined below to incentivize increased participation in the building of these multi-institutional data sets that become an open community resource. 

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1. A marker paper has been published on that tumor type; or
2. 12 months after 100 cases of a given tumor type have had their DICOM data published on TCIA; or
3. The author receives specific approval from the TCGA Image Source Site (ISS) Groups representing any relevant tumor types.

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Specifically, the status of each tumor data set is available below. If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov.

Ongoing Research Efforts

Continuing these efforts CIP is working continues to encourage ad hoc multi-institutional research teams for analysis of these data sets as they are collected. Efforts have already begun or are being initiated for the following TCGA tissue types.  Points of contact for collaborating with the existing research groups can be found on their respective pages.

References

Included below are some posters and presentations which help summarize the CIP TCGA Radiology Initiative and its supporting components such as TCIA.

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