Summary

The TCGA Head-Neck Phenotype Research Group is part of the CIP TCGA Radiology Initiative focused on analyzing images from the TCGA-HNSC collection. Multiple modalities of images which correlate to the head-neck tissue data in the TCGA Data Portal are continuing to be gathered for submission to TCIA.

According to the TCGA page on Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma, researchers hope to make the following types of discoveries:

Determine whether patterns of genomic changes are different between tumors that metastasize to other regions of the body and tumors that remain in the region of origin
Identify genomic differences that distinguish tumors across age and smoking history
Identify genomic differences that are associated with viral infection

Research and Publications

Per TCGA and TCIA Guidelines formal permission requests are still required to submit publications using TCGA-HNSC data. Please see the following links for more information about the freedom-to-publish criteria for these data sets:

Data Source	Status
TCGA Data Portal Publication Guidelines	No restrictions; all data available without limitations
TCIA Data Usage Policies and Restrictions	Projects have not reached 100 imaging cases; Please check with cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov prior to any publication

Please contact us at cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov if you have any questions about these policies.

TCGA Head-Neck Marker Paper and Image Source Sites (ISS)

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. Current TCGA-HNSC source sites include:

University of Pittsburgh / UPMC

This group has not yet been established. We will provide a point of contact for the group from the ISS site(s) as soon as possible to address scientific questions or requests to collaborate with their group.

References

The following links contain publications from the main TCGA project, as well as their posted publication guidelines.