Frequently asked questions

How to download data from IDC?

Check out the Downloading data documentation page!

How do I get my data into IDC?

Note that currently IDC prioritizes submissions from NCI-funded driving projects and data from special selected projects.

• If you would like to submit images, it will be your responsibility to de-identify them first, documenting the de-identification process and submitting that documentation for the review by IDC stakeholders.

• We welcome submissions of image-derived data (expert annotations, AI-generated segmentations) for the images already in IDC, see IDC Zenodo community Curation policy to learn about the requirements for such submissions!

IDC works closely with The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) and mirrors TCIA public collections. If you submit your DICOM data to TCIA and your data is released as a public collection, it will be automatically available in IDC in a following release.

If you are interested in making your data available within IDC, please contact us by sending email to [e-mail].

How much does it cost to use the cloud?

IDC data is stored in the cloud buckets, and you can search and download data from IDC for free and without login.

If you would like to use the cloud for analysis of the data, we recommend you start with the free tier of Google Colab to get free access to a cloud-hosted VM with GPU to experiment with analysis workflows for IDC data. If you are an NIH-funded researcher, you may be eligible for a free allocation via NIH Cloud Lab. US-based researchers can also access free cloud-based computing resources via ACCESS program allocations.

What is the status of IDC?

IDC pilot release took place in Fall 2020, followed by the production release in September 2021.

What data is available?

We host most of the public collections from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). We also host HTAN and other pathology images not hosted by TCIA. You can review the complete, up-to-date list of collections included in IDC.

How to acknowledge IDC?

Please cite the latest paper from the IDC team. Please also make sure you acknowledge the specific data collections you used in your analysis.

Fedorov, A., Longabaugh, W. J. R., Pot, D., Clunie, D. A., Pieper, S. D., Gibbs, D. L., Bridge, C., Herrmann, M. D., Homeyer, A., Lewis, R., Aerts, H. J. W. L., Krishnaswamy, D., Thiriveedhi, V. K., Ciausu, C., Schacherer, D. P., Bontempi, D., Pihl, T., Wagner, U., Farahani, K., Kim, E. & Kikinis, R. National cancer institute imaging data commons: Toward transparency, reproducibility, and scalability in imaging artificial intelligence. Radiographics 43, (2023). https://doi.org/10.1148/rg.230180

What is the difference between IDC and TCIA?

IDC and TCIA are partners in providing FAIR data for cancer imaging researchers. While some of the functions between the two resources are similar, there are also key differences. The table below provides a summary of similarities and differences.

Function	IDC	TCIA
De-identification	no, IDC can only host data already de-identified	yes
Cloud-based data co-located with compute resources	yes	no
Conversion of pathology images and image-derived data into DICOM format	yes	no
Private data collections	no	yes
Public data collections	yes	yes
Version control of the data	yes	no

Where do I learn more about other components of CRDC?

The main website for the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) is https://datacommons.cancer.gov/

What about non-imaging data that accompanies IDC collections?

Clinical data that was shared by the submitters is available for a number of imaging collections in IDC. Please see this tutorial on how to search that data and how to link clinical data with imaging metadata!

Many of the imaging collections are also accompanied by the genomics or proteomics data. CRDC Cancer Data Aggregator (CDA) provides the API to locate such related datasets.

I want to search IDC content using an attribute not available in the portal

IDC Portal gives you access to just a small subset of the metadata accompanying IDC images. If you want to learn more about what is available, you have several options:

• this notebook from our Getting Started tutorial series explains how to use idc-index - a python package that aims to simplify access to IDC data

• this more advanced notebook will help you get started with searching IDC metadata in BigQuery, which gives you access to all of the DICOM metadata extracted from IDC-hosted files

• if you are not comfortable writing queries or coding in pyhon, you can use this DataStudio dashboard to search using some of the attributes that are not available through the portal. You can also extend this dashboard to include additional attributes.