Top New Developments at TCIA for 2015

New Data and Functionality

• New Data Sets
  • 21 new data collections (adding data for 1207 subjects).  There are now 59 data collections for a total of over 28 million images and associated data. 
  • Imaging data linked to Proteomics.  TCIA now contains small subsets of breast and ovarian data with both genomic and proteomic data from the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) Phase III project.  NCI's Cancer Imaging Program will continue to leverage TCIA to expand these types of data sets in 2016.
• New Functionality
  • Internal enhancements - improved curation workflow capabilities, expanded toolset designed for QC of radiation therapy imaging, and an 
  • improved metrics dashboard.  
  • 2015 saw a rapid adoption of the TCIA Digital Object Identifier (DOI) feature which provides a unique link to data sets, and now provides DOIs for all of its collections.

Research Activities

• More than 33,000 unique users visited TCIA in 2015, downloading over 54 terabytes of data.  
• TCIA resources have enabled researchers to share data relating to at least 103 papers published in 2015.  
• Data from the site was featured in two Medscape articles.  
• TCIA was added as a recommended data repository for PLOS ONE articles to share imaging data.  
• Imaging-omics research collaborations
•  Five volunteer TCGA imaging cancer-type research groups continued to investigate imaging-omics
•  A new bladder imaging-genomics was formed.
  

NCI Grant - Funded Activies relied on TCIA:

• Two TCIA-related grant applications were funded this year.  
  • Dr Fred Prior (7U01CA187013-03) aims to implement additional capabilities for radiation therapy, high performance computing and cloud computing.  
  • Dr Mitch Schnall (1U01CA190254-01) plans to share ECOG-ACRIN clinical trial data through TCIA infrastructure in support of NCI's Quantitative Imaging Network (QIN).  
  • TCIA continued to support QIN by serving as the official archive for the network.  This year many QIN sites used TCIA for data analysis challenges and collaborative projects.  There are currently 12 different QIN-related collections in the archive.

• NCI’s Information Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) grantees have also leveraged the site.  
  • Specifically the Quantitative image informatics for cancer research (QIICR) U24 has used TCIA as a test bed for their extensions to the popular 3D Slicer image analysis application, and has uploaded additional data sets to the archive for further sharing with the research community.  They have also leveraged our REST API to provide direct access to to TCIA data from within Slicer.    
  • An additional U24 (5U24CA180927-02) is developing a cloud-based image biomarker optimization platform called C-BIBOP which will include imaging data stored locally or accessed through TCIA to support Challenges to improve segmentation and feature computation algorithms.

Other Activities

• Additional NCI activities relying on TCIA infrastructure include the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis Exceptional Responder precision medicine trial and the planned Coding4LungScreening (C4LS) challenge.  For C4LS, in addition to hosting the NLST data set which will serve as the source data for the challenge, TCIA managed the submission and curation of additional 190 lung screening data from eight centers to further expand the data set which will be used to validate the challenge entries.

Academic Societies

• • providing data to challenges
    • the MICCAI Computational Brain Tumor Cluster of Events (CBTC) competitions 
    • the LUNGx SPIE-AAPM-NCI Lung Nodule Classification Challenge.  
  • Three TCIA technical courses and an imaging-omics workshop at this year’s Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Annual Meeting