The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) Public Access

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Data Usage Policy

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locationhttps://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/data-usage-policies-and-restrictions/

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Any user accessing TCIA data must agree to:

  • Not use the requested datasets, either alone or in concert with any other information, to identify or contact individual participants from whom data and/or samples were collected and follow all other conditions specified in our Site Disclaimer. Approved Users also agree not to generate and use information (e.g., facial images or comparable representations) in a manner that could allow the identities of research participants to be readily ascertained. These provisions do not apply to research investigators operating with specific IRB approval, pursuant to 45 CFR 46, to contact individuals within datasets or to obtain and use identifying information under an IRB-approved research protocol. All investigators including any Approved User conducting “human subjects research” within the scope of 45 CFR 46 must comply with the requirements contained therein.
  • Acknowledge in all oral or written presentations, disclosures, or publications the specific dataset(s) or applicable accession number(s) and the NIH-designated data repositories through which the investigator accessed any data. Citation guidelines for doing this are outlined below.
  • If you are considering mirroring a copy of our publicly available datasets or providing direct access to any of our data via another tool or website using our REST API please review our Data Analysis Centers (DACs) page for more information. DACs must provide attribution and links back to this TCIA data usage policy and require downstream users to do the same.

The summary page for every TCIA dataset includes a Citations & Data Usage Policy tab (see screenshot below).  Please consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy for each Collection before using them.  

  • Most data are freely available to browse, download, and use for commercial, scientific and educational purposes as outlined in the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License or the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  A small number of collections impose Creative Commons licenses with commercial use restrictions, but this is no longer an option for new submissions.
  • Most data are immediately accessible and do not require account registration.  A small subset of collections do require registration and special permission to gain access. Refer to the "Access" column on https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/collections/ for more details. Limited Access Collections are currently released under 1 of 2 custom license options:

  • TCIA takes every step possible to protect the privacy of participants that have agreed to share their data to promote cancer research. Therefore, effective January 6, 2022, all TCIA Collections of brain, head or head/neck cancers (where data could be used to reconstruct a human face) will change from a Creative Commons license to a TCIA Limited Access License. The data will still be available to download for research, but you will need a TCIA account and an approved License Agreement on file with the TCIA Help Desk.


The citation panel on the CT Lymph Node collection page.Image Added.  Please consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy for each Collection you've used to see usage restrictions. Some collections have additional copyrights or restrictions associated with their use which we have summarized at the end of this page for convenience.  

Citing TCIA (general)

For any manuscript developed using data from The Cancer Imaging Archive please cite the relevant collection citations (s) you've used (see below) as well as the following TCIA publication:

Info
titleTCIA Citation

Clark K, Vendt B, Smith K, et alFreymann J, Kirby J, Koppel P, Moore S, Phillips S, Maffitt D, Pringle M, Tarbox L, Prior F. The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA): Maintaining maintaining and Operating a Public Information Repositoryoperating a public information repository. Journal of Digital Imaging. 2013 Dec;26(6):1045-105757.  doiDOI: 10.1007/s10278-013-9622-7. (link)

If you have utilized TCIA in your research, please contact us at help@cancerimagingarchive.net so we can include your work on our Related Publications page.  We also encourage researchers to tweet about their TCIA-related research with the hash tag #TCIAresearch.

Publisher Partnerships

TCIA is an approved repository for the following publishers and journals which encourage or require sharing of source data used by their publications.  

  1. Nature Scientific Data
  2. Springer Nature
  3. PLOS ONE
  4. Elsevier
  5. Medical Physics

Citing Specific TCIA Collections

Each published TCIA Collection has an associated data citation.  When citing a TCIA collection, be sure to use the full data citation rather than citing the wiki page as a URL.  Consult .  Researchers can use https://citation.crosscite.org/ to create citations in the accepted format for most major publishers if you paste in the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) from a TCIA dataset.  Consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy found on each Collection's summary page (see screenshot above) to learn more about how it should be cited and any usage restrictions.  For some collections, there may also be additional papers that should be cited listed in this section.  Here is a screenshot showing where to find the DOI and data usage policy on each collection page:

The citation panel on the CT Lymph Node collection page.Image Removed

Collection Specific Usage Policies

Please consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy for each Collection you've used to see usage restrictions. Some collections have additional copyrights or restrictions associated with their use which we have summarized below for convenience.  

Restricted from Commercial Use

The following data are not permitted for commercial applications.  Please contact the associated data submitters with any questions about utilizing this data.

  1. Phantom FDA - Marios Gavrielides, Tel. (301) 796-2545, marios.gavrielides@fda.hhs.gov
  2. NSCLC-Radiomics - Hugo Aerts, hugo_aerts@dfci.harvard.edu.
  3. NSCLC-Radiomics-Genomics - Hugo Aerts, hugo_aerts@dfci.harvard.edu.

Copyrighted Data

The following data is copyrighted.  Please contact the associated data submitters with any questions about utilizing this data.

  1. 3D segmentation files provided as metadata to PROSTATE-DIAGNOSIS collection - Nicolas Bloch, nicolas.bloch@bmc.org

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Publication Guidelines

Historically TCIA had implemented publication guidelines derived from the policy outlined by the The Cancer Genome Atlas, TCGA. These were followed in addition to the publication policy of the TCGA Data Portal: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/abouttcga/policies/publicationguidelines.  At this time the only data set still under publication embargo is the TCGA-BLCA data set.  This embargo will be lifted on 10/30/2018.  If you wish to publish using this data set please contact the TCIA Helpdesk to request permission.  All other cancer types are now available for use without any special restrictions.  Please be sure to follow the standard TCIA citation guidelines, and to also provide attribution recognizing the TCGA data collection efforts.  An example of a proper attribution is:

"The results <published or shown> here are in whole or part based upon data generated by the TCGA Research Network: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/."