title: The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA): maintaining and operating a public information repository.
abstract: The National Institutes of Health have placed significant emphasis on sharing of research data to support secondary research. Investigators have been encouraged to publish their clinical and imaging data as part of fulfilling their grant obligations. Realizing it was not sufficient to merely ask investigators to publish their collection of imaging and clinical data, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) created the open source National Biomedical Image Archive software package as a mechanism for centralized hosting of cancer related imaging. NCI has contracted with Washington University in Saint Louis to create The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA)-an open-source, open-access information resource to support research, development, and educational initiatives utilizing advanced medical imaging of cancer. In its first year of operation, TCIA accumulated 23 collections (3.3 million images). Operating and maintaining a high-availability image archive is a complex challenge involving varied archive-specific resources and driven by the needs of both image submitters and image consumers. Quality archives of any type (traditional library, PubMed, refereed journals) require management and customer service. This paper describes the management tasks and user support model for TCIA.
authors.affiliation: Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, ERL 510 South Kingshighway Boulevard, St. Louis, MO, 63110, USA, clarkk@mir.wustl.edu.
authors.forename: Kenneth
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Clark
authors.forename: Bruce
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Vendt
authors.forename: Kirk
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Freymann
authors.forename: Justin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kirby
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Koppel
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Moore
authors.forename: Stanley
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Phillips
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Maffitt
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pringle
authors.forename: Lawrence
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Tarbox
authors.forename: Fred
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Prior
mesh_terms: D003952:Diagnostic Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008297:Male; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000458:organization & administration; D064847:Multimodal Imaging / Q000379:methods; D054547:National Cancer Institute (U.S.); D009369:Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis*; D015397:Program Evaluation; D011786:Quality Control; D011873:Radiology Information Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*; D012984:Software; D014481:United States