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The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA)

source available / Overall score: n/a

The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) de-identifies and publishes cancer-related medical images, mostly in DICOM, together with supporting clinical data, annotations and analysis results. Research groups apply to publish collections, which an advisory group reviews before TCIA's team curates and releases them, each with a DataCite DOI and a version history. The National Cancer Institute funds it, and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research manages it.

Openness

2 medium confidence

2.0

license: BSD-3-Clause(OSI
source: partial(NBIA is published at github.com/CBIIT/NBIA-TCIA and is being retired

NBIA, the image archive software TCIA has served DICOM data from, is published under the BSD 3-Clause license and anyone can deploy it. The WordPress collection manager behind TCIA's dataset pages is not part of that release, and TCIA is retiring NBIA in favor of the Imaging Data Commons, so the published code covers only part of the service.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CBIIT/NBIA-TCIA/HEAD/LICENSE.txt recorded 2026-10-08
BSD 3-clause text: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met".
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CBIIT/NBIA-TCIA/master/README.md recorded 2026-10-08
"NBIA enables several medical imaging archives, including TCIA"; "Anyone can deploy a local node of NBIA"; "NBIA is distributed under the BSD 3-clause license."
https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/tcia-api-guides/ recorded 2026-10-08
"Each Collection TCIA publishes is issued a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) through DataCite"; NBIA "is our legacy DICOM management system. It is being retired in favor of using the Imaging Data Commons"; custom "extensions to WordPress" manage dataset metadata.

Adoption

not assessed

TCIA shows view and citation counts on each collection page, but no count of users or of downloads for the archive as a whole was found. No reading was recorded.

https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/collection/lidc-idri/ recorded 2026-10-08
LIDC-IDRI collection page with per-collection view and citation counts; no archive-wide usage figure.

Capability

3 medium confidence

3.0

Each TCIA collection has a DOI, keeps its earlier versions available for download and can be fetched through an API, as PhysioNet's published projects can. Collections arrive through an application that an advisory group reviews and a curation team publishes, with no interface for submitting data programmatically, which Dryad and Zenodo offer.

https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/about-the-cancer-imaging-archive-tcia/ recorded 2026-10-08
"TCIA is funded by the Cancer Imaging Program (CIP) within the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and managed by the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR)."
https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/collection/lidc-idri/ recorded 2026-10-08
"DOI: 10.7937/K9/TCIA.2015.LO9QL9SX"; "Version 4 : Updated 2020/09/21"; "Previous Versions Version 3: Updated 2015/07/27" with its own download table.
https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/submission-and-de-identification-overview/ recorded 2026-10-08
"The first step to publishing cancer imaging data on TCIA is to submit an application ... that will be reviewed by the NCI TCIA Advisory Group."
https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/tcia-api-guides/ recorded 2026-10-08
"Each Collection TCIA publishes is issued a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) through DataCite"; NBIA "is our legacy DICOM management system. It is being retired in favor of using the Imaging Data Commons"; custom "extensions to WordPress" manage dataset metadata.

Verified 2026-10-08