In partnership with The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), the American Association of Physicists in Medicine released a special virtual issue of Medical Physics in March 2021 titled, “Datasets Hosted in NCI’s Cancer Imaging Archive.” This special issue aims to highlight valuable examples of both Medical Physics Data Set Articles (MPDAs) and publicly available data sets that can be reused for future research endeavors and utilized for addressing emerging scientific or clinical questions.

Public data sets play a key role in enabling the medical research community to validate and build upon each other’s work using data acquired outside of their home institutions. This is especially critical for stimulating studies utilizing quantitative data analysis (radiomics) or artificial intelligence/machine learning approaches, for which validation and generalizability on independent external cohorts are essential for acceptance and future clinical translation. Recognizing this fact, Medical Physics has introduced the MPDAs as a new category of article submissions. MPDAs help facilitate the use of valuable open‐access data sets by granting authors the opportunity to publish detailed scientific or clinical descriptions of their data with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs) for future citations. Unlike traditional manuscripts, these articles would focus on reproducibility and the data set’s potential use cases and details of how it was acquired, curated, and published.

Check out the virtual issue to find MPDAs for 7 data sets that were published on TCIA and learn more about the importance of sharing data to enable reproducibility and reuse.