Driven by input from its scientific community, the Cancer Imaging Program (CIP) finds itself at the junction of two powerful scientific requisites; the need for cross-disciplinary research and inter-institutional data-sharing to speed scientific discovery and reduce redundancy, and the need to provide imaging phenotype data to augment large scale genomic analysis. |
As an opportunity to leverage that wealth of new biomedical knowledge, CIP committed substantial effort to gather and place in The Cancer Imaging Archive the clinical diagnostic images that match the genomically analyzed TCGA tissue cases. CIP encouraged an ad hoc image research team to study glioblastoma. The Cancer Imaging Archive now contains a TCGA GBM collection with images from more than 150 cases whose molecular and clinical patient data can be accessed in the TCGA Data Portal. A multi-institutional team coordinated by Dr Adam Flanders of Thomas Jefferson University assembled researchers from University of Virginia, Emory, Stanford, Henry Ford Hospital and NCI CCR have created the TCGA Glioma Phenotype Research Group. In less than a year's time they have quickly demonstrated the advantages of such scientific collaboration by their rapid scientific progress with a number of publications and abstracts presented and in the pipeline for future venues.
Presently, CIP is developing agreements with many of the TCGA Tissue Site Source institutions to recover and place in the Image Archive collections of diagnostic images that match the genomic data now being deposited in the publically accessible TCGA Data Portal on cancers of the breast (BRCA) renal (KIRC) and lung (LUAD) and in due time, many of the future 20-plus tumors that TCGA will characterize as the program moves forward.
Continuing these efforts CIP is working to accrue images from additional sites for both GBM and the other tissue types being collected as part of the original TCGA project. Please see the child pages below to view ongoing projects and data availability for each cancer type. Efforts have already begun by researchers in the following TCGA tissue types:
Included below are some posters and presentations which help summarize the CIP TCGA Radiology Initiative and its supporting components such as TCIA.