Cancer Imaging Archive relocated to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
The Cancer Imaging Archive, a collection of diagnostic images of cancer assessable for free download, has relocated to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock. More than 40 terabytes of data were transferred from the archive’s former location at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. The relocation coincided with the appointment of Fred Prior, Ph.D., as inaugural chair of the UAMS Department of Biomedical Informatics. Prior is the principal investigator for the Cancer Imaging Archive.
The archive, funded by the Cancer Imaging Program of the National Cancer Institute, consists of 62 collections of studies categorized by subject. The subjects typically have a cancer type and/or anatomical site, such as the lung, brain, breast, etc. The subjects are listed in a table, with links that provide information concerning the scientific value of a collection, information about how to obtain any supporting non-image data which may be available, and links to view or download the image data.
The archive is intended to serve cancer researchers, modality vendors, and as a resource tool for medical students, radiology residents, and radiologists themselves. Radiologists are encouraged to submit images, which will be peer-reviewed for potential inclusion.
More 250 academic papers published and/or presented in scientific sessions at clinical conferences are based on research that utilized images from the archive. In a press release, Prior stated that an important area of research that makes intensive use of the Cancer Imaging Archive is computer-based image analysis or radiomics. As an example, he pointed out that “we are extracting tens of thousands of data points from one CT scan, and then analyzing these image features to identify disease signatures. We are comparing genomic feature sets with the imaging feature sets to try to understand how to identify different disease subtypes that may require different therapies.”
The archive, which has a lengthy list of frequently asked questions and a user’s guide, may be accessed here.