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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 or NBIA Search RESTful interfaces, described at TCIA Programmatic Application Programming 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 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.)

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How does NBIA Data Retriever organize the data when performing a download?

Folder Structure

The DICOM data can be saved in two different folder structures:

• The Descriptive Directory Name organizes the files in a child folder under the destination folder as follows: Collection Name > Patient ID > Study Date + Study ID + Study Description (54 char max) + last 5 digits of Study Instance UID > Series Number + Series Description (54 char max) + last 5 digits of Series Instance UID
• The Classic Directory Name organizes the files in a child folder under the destination folder as follows: Collection Name > Patient ID > Study Instance UID > Series Instance UID

In addition to the DICOM data, there will also be a LICENSE file outlining our Data Usage Policy and a metadata.csv file which contains key information extracted from the DICOM headers.

File Names

The file naming system used by the NBIA Data Retriever provides a natural ordering of the files within each series. The DICOM files are first ordered by ordinal position of acquisition number and then by ordinal position of instance number. The files are then assigned numbers with the lowest acquisition being 1 and the lowest instance number within that acquisition being 1, separated by a dash. The numbers are incremented by 1 as the next values are encountered. All values are left-padded with zeros to provide for the ordering within the file system. 

As an example, a series with two acquisition numbers, with each acquisition having 42 instance numbers, would start with 1-01.dcm for the lowest acquisition number and the lowest instance number in that acquisition. The last file in that acquisition would be 1-42.dcm.  Then the second acquisition would start with 2-01.dcm and end with 2-42.dcm. For the purposes of ordering, an empty value in either acquisition number or instance number is lower than an file having a value for those numbers.

How do I know which version of the NBIA Data Retriever I Retriever I am running?

For NBIA Data Retriever version 3.0 and later, the version information appears in the About menu. The version also appears at the bottom of the login windows when you download a private collection. The following steps explain how to find out which version of the app you are running for version 2.0 and earlier in different operating systems.

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