About IDC

NCI Imaging Data Commons (IDC) is a cloud-based repository of publicly available cancer imaging data co-located with the analysis and exploration tools and resources. IDC is a node within the broader NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) infrastructure that provides secure access to a large, comprehensive, and expanding collection of cancer research data. All data hosted by IDC will be available publicly. The current content of IDC is populated using the radiology collections from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) , as well as data collected by other major NCI initiatives, such as TCGA, CPTAC, NLST, and HTAN. IDC does not perform de-identification of images but will accept data de-identified by TCIA or other Data Coordinating Centers that are approved by NCI Security.

IDC provides access to the data standardized using the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standard. IDC collaborates with the projects generating the data to harmonize alternative formats into DICOM representation. Its content includes not only images, but also image annotations and analysis results, and is linked using common identifiers to the other types of cancer data, such as proteomics and genomics datasets in the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC). Access to the data is supported using standard interfaces. Given the IDC's role as an imaging data science platform, a major focus is on establishing best practices for imaging research. In this regard, a key role of IDC is in preparing and adapting commonly used tools for image analysis to be run on cloud environments with IDC-hosted datasets. Summarized derived data from analyses previously run will be associated with imaging data on IDC for ease of use by the research community.

Data Types

IDC contains various types of images and image-derived data harmonized using the DICOM standard. As of October 2022, IDC contains the following types of images:

• Clinical and preclinical imaging
• Radiological images (e.g., CT, MRI, PET)
• Digital pathology images
• Multispectral microscopy images
• Image annotations (e.g., planar and volumetric, regions of interest)
• Parametric maps derived from images (e.g., perfusion and diffusion maps)
• Measurements derived from the images (e.g., radiomics features for the annotated regions of interest)
• Expert assessments of the image findings (e.g., qualitative characterizations of lesion appearance)

Data Submission to IDC

Currently IDC will consider submissions from NCI-funded driving projects and data from special selected projects.

IDC only hosts public datasets. It does not support access limitations, such as data embargoes or sequestration.

Submitters of data to IDC must ensure that the data have been de-identified with respect to protected health information (PHI). Currently, IDC accepts data de-identified by The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) . Datasets de-identified by other data coordinating centers (DCC) may be considered but in such cases further information will be required (see Google Doc form that will be used to collect information about how de-identification is done).

If you are interested in making your data available within IDC, please contact us by sending email to support+submissions@canceridc.dev.

Citing IDC

An overview of IDC is available in this open access publication. If you use IDC, please acknowledge us by citing it!

Fedorov, A., Longabaugh, W. J. R., Pot, D., Clunie, D. A., Pieper, S., Aerts, H. J. W. L., Homeyer, A., Lewis, R., Akbarzadeh, A., Bontempi, D., Clifford, W., Herrmann, M. D., Höfener, H., Octaviano, I., Osborne, C., Paquette, S., Petts, J., Punzo, D., Reyes, M., Schacherer, D. P., Tian, M., White, G., Ziegler, E., Shmulevich, I., Pihl, T., Wagner, U., Farahani, K. & Kikinis, R.
NCI Imaging Data Commons. Cancer Res. 81, 4188–4193 (2021).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-21-0950

You can also review the accompanying demonstration videos for a quick summary of some of the key features of the platform.