Public Cancer Imaging Data Repositories for Biomedical Data Science Research Workshop at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing & Computer Assisted Intervention

The 23rd International Conference on Medical Image Computing & Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) is being hosted this year from October 4–8, 2020. Attendees can register for a public workshop—scheduled for October 8—on NCI’s public image repositories, including The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) and the soon-to-be-launched Imaging Data Commons (IDC). During the workshop, trainees will learn the similarities, differences, and features of NCI’s image repositories and how to search them for imaging data sets of interest.

NCI has made significant investments in the creation and development of public data repositories to enable and promote sharing and secondary analysis of cancer imaging data through an open science approach. Since 2011, TCIA has provided the imaging research community with a stable and reliable resource for sharing de-identified clinical radiology (DICOM). TCIA is a growing collection containing digital pathology images of a variety of cancers, clinical metadata, annotations, and third-party analysis results.

In October 2020, NCI will publicly release the IDC, the imaging-specific repository within the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons. The IDC will provide researchers access to image collections from TCIA and beyond. Through a robust infrastructure containing metadata and image-derived data (segmentations, annotations, and image-based analysis results), IDC allows researchers to browse and connect imaging data to NCI’s Cloud Resources for computation, data analysis, and archival of the results.