Background

TCGA began in 2006 as a three-year pilot jointly sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and National Human Genome Research Institute. The TCGA pilot project (focused initially on glioblastoma, ovary, and lung cancers) confirmed that an atlas of genomic changes could be constructed for specific cancer types. It also showed that a national network of research and technology teams working on related projects could pool their efforts, create an economy of scale and develop an infrastructure for making the data publicly accessible. Importantly, it proved that making the data freely available would enable researchers across the world to make and validate important discoveries. The success of that pilot led the National Institutes of Health to commit major new resources to TCGA to collect and characterize more than 20 additional tumor types.  All of the data is made freely accessible for researchers to download via their  TCGA Data Portal.

As an opportunity to leverage that wealth of new biomedical knowledge, CIP committed substantial effort to gather and place the clinical diagnostic images that match the genomically analyzed TCGA tissue cases in to TCIA. CIP has developed agreements with many of the TCGA Tissue Site Source institutions to collect many of the 20-plus cancer types that TCGA has analyzed.  Imaging Source Site (ISS) Groups are being created 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 ISS Groups are given the opportunity to publish a marker paper for a given cancer type as outlined in the publication policies outlined below to incentivize increased participation in the building of these multi-institutional data sets that become an open community resource. 

Publication Policies

TCIA publication guidelines are derived from the policy outlined by the The Cancer Genome Atlas. These must be followed in addition to the publication policy of the TCGA Data Portal: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/abouttcga/policies/publicationguidelines.

There are no limitations on publications containing analyses using any TCGA-linked imaging data set if the data set meets one of the following three freedom-to-publish criteria:

1. A marker paper has been published on that tumor type; or
2. 12 months after 100 cases of a given tumor type have had their DICOM data published on TCIA; or
3. The author receives specific approval from the TCGA Image Source Site (ISS) Groups representing any relevant tumor types.

Specifically, the status of each tumor data set is available below. If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact cancerimagingarchive@mail.nih.gov.

Ongoing Research Efforts

CIP continues to encourage ad hoc multi-institutional research teams for analysis of these data sets as they are collected. Efforts have already begun or are being initiated for the following TCGA tissue types.  Points of contact for collaborating with the existing research groups can be found on their respective pages.

References

Included below are some posters and presentations which help summarize the CIP TCGA Radiology Initiative and its supporting components such as TCIA.

• Imaging and Genomics: Is There a Synergy? - Published in August 2012 Radiology, 264, 329-331.
• A Scalable Methodology for Correlating Clinical Imaging Features with TCGA Data - Presented at TCGA Network Symposium, November 17-18, Washington, DC
• The Cancer Imaging Archive: a Repository of Advanced Imaging Information Correlated with TCGA Samples - Presented at TCGA Network Symposium, November 17-18, Washington, DC

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

• TCGA Publications
• TCGA Publication Guidelines