Data Usage Policies and Restrictions

Data Usage Policy

Any user accessing TCIA data must agree to:

• Not attempt to identify individual human research participants from whom the data were obtained, and follow all other conditions specified in our Site Disclaimer
• 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.

Please consult the Citation & Data Usage Policy for each Collection you've used to verify any 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. 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. 

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.

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 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.  

Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) Publication Guidelines

CPTAC data sets consist of a wide variety of data types including proteomics, genomics, and clinical in addition to radiology and pathology imaging.  If you utilize CPTAC data which was obtained outside of TCIA you must adhere to their data use agreement outlined at https://proteomics.cancer.gov/data-portal/about/data-use-agreement.  If all of the data used in your analyses was obtained directly from TCIA you need only follow TCIA's Data Usage Policies and Restrictions.

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.
4. NSCLC-Radiomics-Interobserver1 - Hugo Aerts, hugo_aerts@dfci.harvard.edu.
5. Head-Neck-Radiomics-HN1 - 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.  As of 10/30/2018 all 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/."