Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

Data Usage Policy

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

Excerpt


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

Citing TCIA (general)

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

Info
titleTCIA Citation

Clark K, Vendt B, Smith K, Freymann J, Kirby J, Koppel P, Moore S, Phillips S, Maffitt D, Pringle M, Tarbox L, Prior F. The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA): maintaining and operating a public information repository. Journal of Digital Imaging. 2013 Dec;26(6):1045-57. DOI: 10.1007/s10278-013-9622-7

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.

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.  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.  

Excerpt

In some cases the image collections in The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) were provided with specific restrictions in regards to their usage.  For example, some data may be the subject of patent applications or issued patents, and you may need to seek a license for its commercial use. This is covered in the provisions that all users agree to during account registration. For ease of use we have summarized any such restrictions on this page.

All other collections not mentioned here should be considered freely available to browse, download, and use for commercial, scientific and educational purposes as outlined in the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.  Questions may be directed to help@cancerimagingarchive.net.

Collection Specific Publication Policies

In addition to following TCIA's Citation Guidelines, some collections have additional restrictions, required citations or acknowledgements associated with their use.

1. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Collections

TCIA publication guidelines are derived from the policy outlined by the The Cancer Genome Atlas. These must be followed in addition to the publication policy of the TCGA Data Portal: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/abouttcga/policies/publicationguidelines.

There are no limitations on publications containing analyses using any TCGA-linked imaging data set if the data set meets one of the following three freedom-to-publish criteria:

  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.

Imaging Source Site (ISS) Groups will be populated 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 are given the opportunity to publish a marker paper for a given cancer type per the aforementioned publication policy. It is hoped that this will generate increased participation in the building of these multi-institutional data sets that become an open community resource.

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

 

Tumor Type

TCGA Data Portal Status (clinical, genomics, and pathology data)

TCIA Data Status (diagnostic imaging data)

TCGA-BLCANo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-BRCA

No restrictions; all data available without limitations

No restrictions; image data available without limitations

TCGA-CESCNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
TCGA-COADNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
TCGA-ESCAPublication limitations in place until 07/07/2015. Please check with tcga@mail.nih.gov prior to any publicationCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-GBM

No restrictions; all data available without limitations

No restrictions; image data available without limitations

TCGA-HNSCNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsPublication limitations in place until 5/20/2015; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
TCGA-KICHNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-KIRC

No restrictions; all data available without limitations

No restrictions; image data available without limitations

TCGA-KIRPNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-LGG

No restrictions; all data available without limitations

Publication limitations in place until 6/30/2015; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-LIHC

Publication limitations in place until 07/31/2014. Please check with tcga@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

Collection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-LUAD

No restrictions; all data available without limitations

Collection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-LUSCNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-OV

No restrictions; all data available without limitations

Publication limitations in place until 8/15/2015; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-PRAD

No restrictions; all data available without limitations

Collection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

TCGA-READNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
TCGA-SARCPublication limitations in place until 11/28/2015. Please check with tcga@mail.nih.gov prior to any publicationCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
TCGA-STADNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
TCGA-THCANo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
TCGA-UCECNo restrictions; all data available without limitationsCollection has not reached 100 imaging subjects; please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication
2. LIDC-IDRI

When using this data in scientific publications or technical reports please cite the following reference:

Armato SG III, McLennan G, Bidaut L, McNitt-Gray MF, Meyer CR, Reeves AP, Zhao B, Aberle DR, Henschke CI, Hoffman EA, Kazerooni EA, MacMahon H, van Beek EJR, Yankelevitz D, et al.: The Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) and Image Database Resource Initiative (IDRI): A completed reference database of lung nodules on CT scans. Medical Physics, 38: 915--931, 2011.

Additionally, please include the following attribution:

The authors acknowledge the National Cancer Institute and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and their critical role in the creation of the free publicly available LIDC/IDRI Database used in this study.

3. Phantom FDA

When using this data in scientific publications or technical reports please cite the following reference:

Marios A Gavrielides , Lisa M Kinnard, Kyle J Myers, Jenifer Peregoy, William F Pritchard, Rongping Zeng, Juan Esparza, John Karanian, and Nicholas Petrick , "A resource for the assessment of lung nodule size estimation methods: database of thoracic CT scans of an anthropomorphic phantom", Optics Express , vol. 18, n.14, pp. 15244-15255, 2010.

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.

...