The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) is intended to be a resource to the research community. As such, an Advisory Group was formed to ensure that every dataset in the archive is one that would be of value to our target audiences. The TCIA Advisory Group reviews each candidate dataset on a quarterly basis using the criteria above and considering the availability of resources to decide whether to accept, reject, or ask for clarifications for each candidate collection.

It is highly recommended that submitters review the CICADAS checklist prior to submission, and provide a preprint addressing these details as part of their proposal.

When researchers submit proposals for new Collections or Analysis Results to the Advisory Group for consideration the following questions are used to help determine their value to the research community:

  • How important is this data set to facilitating research reproducibility in this topic area?
  • Does this dataset address a data gap for critical current research for a clinical need?
  • Is this a novel/unique dataset compared to what’s already in TCIA?
  • Is the dataset of a sufficient size/scale and demographic distribution to support scientific conclusions or hypothesis development?
  • Does the dataset contain sufficient supporting data and documentation?
    • Supporting data examples: Patient demographics, medical history/comorbidities, treatment details, outcomes, or image analyses (i.e. labels for classifications or segmentations).
  • If the dataset consists of an analysis of image based data, is it based on a biological hypothesis or other proposed discovery about the patho-physiological basis of cancer?

Proposals which contain supporting non-image data (e.g. patient outcomes, training classifiers/labels, tumor segmentations) are highly preferred to those which lack these characteristics.

The Advisory Group is composed of experts in cancer imaging, informatics and related technologies. Current membership includes:

  • Lalitha Shankar, Acting Associate Director, Branch Chief, NCI Cancer Imaging Program
  • Hala R. Makhlouf, Program Director, Cancer Diagnosis Program
  • Krishnan Patel, Assistant Research Physician, Radiation Oncology Branch, Center for Cancer Research
  • Frank Lin, Head, Targeted Radionuclide Therapy Section, Molecular Imaging Branch, Center for Cancer Research
  • Keyvan Farahani, Senior Data Science, Imaging and AI Program Director, NHLBI (on full-time NCI Detail)