The Cancer Imaging Archive now also hosts pathology images from the National Lung Screening Trial, in addition to the existing radiology images and a dataset from the trial. The NLST was conducted by two separate networks of screening centers: 1) Lung Screening Study Network (LSS):10 centers and 34,612 participants; and 2) American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN): 23 centers and 18,840 participants. TCIA only hosts pathology data from LSS. The ACRIN pathology images and data are not available through TCIA.
As part of the pathology collection effort tissue, images, and data was obtained from 463 lung cancer patients (out of 1,284 total lung cancer patients in LSS). Note that nine of these 463 participants had two primary lung tumors; only one tumor’s data and images are accessible through TCIA for these nine participants.
Getting Access
To gain access to NLST pathology data and images, please submit a request through the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Cancer Data Access System (CDAS). More information can be found here: https://biometry.nci.nih.gov/cdas/nlst/requests/instructions/
About the Pathology Data
The NLST pathology specimen collection consists of biospecimens, images, and data for research. Near the conclusion of NLST activities, all available blocks of preserved lung tissue from NLST lung cancer patients were requested from pathology labs. Tissue cores were sampled from these donor blocks and placed into tissue microarrays (TMAs) and into Eppendorf tubes for analysis by the research community; the request process for the tissue specimens is under development as of October 2013. The images were obtained as an intermediate step in TMA construction. A thin section was cut from each donor tissue block, stained with hematoxylin and eosin (H & E), and imaged using an Aperio ScanScope.
Overview of TCIA Pathology Tools
Query Tool: To facilitate investigator access to images and associated metadata, a Java based Query Tool has been developed. It provides researchers with an intuitive interface that they can use to query the repository of non-imaging pathology data. The NLST pathology data dictionary is available to assist researcher in understanding the variables in the LSSPath tables. Researchers also use the query tool to launch the pathology viewer (caMicroscope)
caMicroscope: caMicroscope is the pathology viewer that provides researchers with an HTML5 based web client that can be used to view a digitized pathology image at full resolution. Users can zoom in/out, and pan across the image. caMicroscope also allows one to create annotations, save them and retrieve annotations that were previously drawn.