...

Is the NBIA Data Retriever Open Source?

Yes!   The NBIA Data Retriever, like the back end backend server that it talks to, is licensed under the 3 clause BSD license, sometimes referred to as the 'new' or 'modified' BSD license.   The BSD license is very permissive, business-friendly, and approved by the Open Source Initiative.   The source code is available from Github GitHub in the CBIIT/NBIA-TCIA repository, specifically in the software/nbia-download-manager subdirectory.   Developers are free to review or fork to create derivative works.   Of course, we would appreciate, but do not require, ' pull ' requests back to the repository if you have created nice new features or bug fixes that others might benefit from.   They would be reviewed by the NBIA development team for inclusion, possibly after some tweaks, back into the main repository.

If you do create a derivative work, please keep in mind that the RESTful API that the NBIA Data Retriever uses to communicate back to the NBIA services is not standardized.   The API could change in future versions of NBIA or the NBIA Data Retriever, though we do try to maintain some level of backwards compatibility.   The same is true of the format for the Manifest manifest files that drive the NBIA Data Retriever.   It is up to the maintainer of derivative works to stay ' up-to-day' date on the RESTful API and manifest file format.

...

Data in the archive is available through other methods.   For example, a person versed in scripting or programming could easily pull data from the archive using the TCIA 's or NBIA Search 's RESTful interfaces, described at TCIA Programmatic Interface REST API Guides.   Other organizations and people have also created software that can access data in TCIA.   Many, but not all, of these tools and sites are listed in the Data Analysis Centers section of TCIA's web site.   If you are interested in using TCIA data in the cloud, please check out NCI's Imaging Data Commons, which host hosts public subsets (not all – yet) of TCIA data on a cloud platform for use by researchers.   (IDC is still growing, and has not yet reached its full plan yet.)

...