Skip to Content
Contact DCTD
Show menu
Search this site
Last Updated: 07/31/2020

The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) Announces Its First COVID-19 Data Set Available to the Scientific Community

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 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.

View the first publicly available TCIA COVID-19 data set. External Link

  • 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. 
Chest Radiograph (left) and Computed Tomography (CT) image (right) of the same patient taken one day apart. Patchy bilateral ground-glass/consolidative opacities are seen in both lungs.

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). External Link

Background on TCIA

  • Funded by NCI’s Cancer Imaging Program, managed by the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, and operated in partnership with the University of Arkansas Medical Center External Link
  • Curated and published more than 50 million images from NCI programs including:

    The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)
    The Clinical Proteomics Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC)
    The Applied Proteogenomics Organizational Learning and Outcomes network (APOLLO)
    NCI clinical trials

  • Accepts data submission proposals to assist investigators with meeting the data sharing requirements associated with grants, publications, and challenge competitions