Data Usage Policies and Restrictions

Data Usage Policy

Most collections 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.  Please consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy for each Collection you've used to see usage restrictions. Some collections have additional copyrights or restrictions associated with their use which we have summarized at the end of this page for convenience.  

Citing TCIA (general)

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

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.

Publisher Partnerships

TCIA is an approved repository for the following publishers and journals which encourage or require sharing of source data used by their publications.  

1. Nature Scientific Data
2. Springer Nature
3. PLOS ONE
4. Elsevier
5. Medical Physics

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.  Consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy found on each Collection's summary page 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.  Here is a screenshot showing where to find the DOI and data usage policy on each collection page:

Collection Specific Usage Policies

Please consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy for each Collection you've used to see usage restrictions. Some collections have additional copyrights or restrictions associated with their use which we have summarized below for convenience.  

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.

1. 3D segmentation files provided as metadata to PROSTATE-DIAGNOSIS collection - Nicolas Bloch, nicolas.bloch@bmc.org

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Publication Guidelines

Historically TCIA had implemented publication guidelines derived from the policy outlined by the The Cancer Genome Atlas, TCGA. These were followed in addition to the publication policy of the TCGA Data Portal: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/abouttcga/policies/publicationguidelines.  At this time the only data set still under publication embargo is the TCGA-BLCA data set.  If you wish to publish using this data set please contact the TCIA Helpdesk to request permission.  All other cancer types are now available for use without any special restrictions.  Please be sure to follow the standard TCIA citation guidelines, and to also provide attribution recognizing the TCGA data collection efforts.  An example of a proper attribution is:

"The results <published or shown> here are in whole or part based upon data generated by the TCGA Research Network: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/."