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.

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 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 or the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  In rare circumstances commercial use may be prohibited using Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).  A small portion of our datasets also require users's to request permission to gain access.  

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:

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.