The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST)

NLST Summary

An NLST summary, found at the link below, is offered through the Cancer Data Access System (CDAS) maintained by Information Management System (IMS), contracted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) as keepers and statistical analyzers of the NLST trial data.  The summary includes:

• Introduction
• Recruitment and Enrollment
• Screening for Lung Cancer 
• Diagnostic Evaluation of Lung Cancer
• Lung Cancer Data
• Non-lung Cancer Data
• Participant Withdrawal
• Mortality
• Results
• Images
• Biospecimens

https://www28.imsweb.com/cdas/nlst/learn/trial_sum

NLST Design & Process, Protocol Documents, and Results

https://www28.imsweb.com/cdas/nlst/learn/main_findings

NLST Publications and Projects

http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/noteworthy-trials/nlst/publications-from-nlst

https://www28.imsweb.com/cdas/nlst/pubs_projects

NLST Data Collected

https://www28.imsweb.com/cdas/nlst/learn/data_collected

Accessing NLST Trial Data and Images

While NLST summary, design, protocols, and results are well-described and publicly available, access to trial data and images is restricted to NLST investigators and their collaborators with an NCI-approved research plan.  Data and images are owned by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and subject to IRBs at NCI and at the institutions through which participants were recruited.  NLST investigators with a proposed research plan must register for a CDAS account and petition for data and images through a formal CDAS procedure provided by IMS; see:

https://www28.imsweb.com/cdas/studies/nlst

> Non-image Data

NLST investigators with approved access to NLST data may acquire copies of data in two different ways:

• Directly from IMS
  This is a direct request for specific data.  Data provided may be in SAS datasets, Excel spreadsheets, or CSV files.
   
• Indirectly, through the Query Tool (QT): NLST Database Query Tool
  Investigators launch the web-based QT, make menu-driven queries against the QT database (a significant subset of all trial data), and save query results to an Excel spreadsheet.  The chief advantage to the QT is the ability to rapidly adjust queries and build a final spreadsheet for analysis.  In addition, the QT offers the ability to download associated CT image

> Images

All CT images are avaliable to NLST investigators with approved access to NLST data and images.  The chest X-rays are not available.  Subsets of the CT images may be obtained in two ways:

• Request from IMS. Petition IMS for images associated with an NCI-approved project.  IMS notfies The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) management with a list of images to provide.  TCIA pulls the images to an external hard drive (provided by the investigator) and ships the images to the investigator.
• Request with Query Tool. The investigator uses the Query Tool to define cohorts of subjects using non-image trial data, then directly downloads the associated CT images directly to their computer using the TCIA Download Manager tool.
  

 For general details about the images, see NLST Images -- General Details