FLC | The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) debuts COVID-19 data set

The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) debuts COVID-19 data set

August 4, 2020

The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) External Link is dedicating a portion of its resources to provide free and open access to imaging data from patients with COVID-19. TCIA is funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Imaging Program, managed by the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, and operated in partnership with the University of Arkansas Medical Center

TCIA is well-positioned to address the urgent need for COVID-19 imaging resources, as its infrastructure and processes are already in place to make these data publicly available. Established in 2011, TCIA is a service to the cancer imaging research community that de-identifies and hosts a large archive of medical images of cancer accessible for public download. Data are published as “collections” where patients’ imaging data are typically arranged by a common disease, image modality or type (e.g., MRI, CT, digital histopathology), or research focus.

Data are from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and consist of radiographic and CT imaging studies for 105 patients who tested positive for COVID-19. Each patient is described by a limited set of clinical data correlates that includes demographics, comorbidities, selected lab data, and key radiology findings. Data are cross-linked to SARS-COV-2 cDNA sequence data extracted from clinical isolates from the same population and uploaded to the GenBank repository. These unique data provide an opportunity for researchers across the world to analyze the effects of COVID-19 in a rural population.

TCIA is expected to provide access to additional COVID-19 cohorts, including data collected by the Center for Interventional Oncology in the NIH Clinical Center and NCI Center for Cancer Research (CCR), as well as by the Molecular Imaging Program in CCR. TCIA will also serve as the initial repository for data collected from Radiological Society of North America’s (RSNA) International COVID-19 Open Radiology Database (RICORD).