Getting started

Whether you are new to the cloud, or you consider yourself an expert, we encourage you to apply for free Google cloud credits that we provide to our users to support cancer imaging research projects that work with Imaging Data Commons. All reasonable requests will receive a $300 allocation of credits that do not expire, and we will not require you to provide a credit card information to verify your identity. All you have to do is fill out and submit this application form.

IDC is not the place that gives you a push-button solution to your analysis needs, but aims to help you do the analyses you would usually do on your local resources, but faster, and with better reproducibility, and at scale. Our goal in the various examples is to give you a taste of what can be done with IDC data.

While the possibilities of what you can do with the IDC hosted data are endless, you can ...

  1. Use the IDC portal to build a cohort of cases that are needed for your use case: see demo video - Introduction to IDC portal

  2. Interrogate the DICOM metadata directly from a Colab notebook (or BigQuery Console): see demo notebook - Exploration of LIDC collection

  3. Use Google Colab notebooks to operate on the cohort: see demo notebook - Working with IDC cohorts and the accompanying tutorial video

  4. Use Google DataStudio to build interactive data dashboards for your cohort: see example of using DataStudio to build a custom dashboard of IDC content

  5. Deploy existing tools on a GCP Virtual Machine to support visualization and analysis of the data from your cohort: learn how you can launch a desktop-like VM running 3D Slicer

  6. Develop reproducible analysis workflows operating on public data that can be easily shared with your colleagues and referenced from your paper: see the growing list of the Colab Notebooks implementing use cases relevant in cancer imaging (such as the use of nnU-Net for segmenting lung nodules)

What you can doWhat you need to do it

Interact with the IDC portal to explore and build a cohort

no prerequisites

Visualize images hosted by IDC

no prerequisites, daily quota in place based on your IP

Save cohorts using IDC portal

account on IDC portal

Save your IDC cohort under your project in Google Cloud

Google account, Google Cloud project, free operations under BigQuery sandbox subject to limits

Use Google BigQuery to further explore metadata for your cohort

Google account, Google Cloud project, free operations under BigQuery sandbox subject to limits

Use Google Colab notebooks to further explore and do preliminary analysis of your cohort

Google account, Google Cloud project, free operations under Google Cloud free tier

Use Google DataStudio to build dashboards for your cohort

Google account

Store data in GCP Storage buckets, create DICOM stores, set up your own instance of OHIF or Slim viewers

Google account, Google Cloud project, billing set up (i.e., credit card or cloud credits needed)

Use Google Compute or AI Notebooks Virtual Machines to do the analysis of the cohort

Google account, Google Cloud project, billing set up (i.e., credit card or cloud credits needed)

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