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 the clinical diagnostic images that match the genomically analyzed TCGA tissue cases in The Cancer Imaging Archive. 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 200 subjects 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 across the country to create 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 brain (GBM/LGG), breast (BRCA), renal (KIRC), 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 enable 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:
Included below are some posters and presentations which help summarize the CIP TCGA Radiology Initiative and its supporting components such as TCIA.
The following links contain publications from the main TCGA project, as well as their posted publication guidelines.