AIMI-IBIIS Seminar: Justin Kirby - The Cancer Imaging Archive: Addressing the Cancer Imaging Community's Data Sharing Needs

Speaker(s): 
Justin Kirby, Technical Project Manager Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research; Technical Director, Cancer Imaging Informatics Lab

Join via Zoom link

Abstract: 

Access to large, high-quality datasets collected from heterogeneous patient populations and imaging modalities is essential for researchers to explore and validate hypotheses that will generalize beyond their own institution. This is especially important as researchers increasingly apply deep learning or radiomics techniques where minor variations in the image data can lead to spurious correlations with patient diagnoses and outcomes.

Unfortunately, regulatory constraints make broad sharing of medical data from human subjects a complex process which most individual investigators and institutions are not equipped to handle. At the same time, there is increasing pressure on researchers from funding agencies and publishers to share data.  The National Cancer Institute funded The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) in 2011 to help bridge this gap.  TCIA provides hands-on assistance to help investigators safely de-identify their data, as well as long term hosting to assure stable access to research community.  Each dataset is published with a title, author list, abstract, and persistent Digital Object Identifier so that they can be properly cited by other researchers and linked to their ORCiD profile.

TCIA now contains over 115 unique data collections of more than 50 million images. Recognizing that images alone are not enough to conduct meaningful research, most collections are linked to rich supporting data including patient outcomes, treatment information, genomic / proteomic analyses, and expert image analyses (segmentations, annotations, and image features). This lecture will teach attendees how to propose new datasets for publication and how to access existing datasets on TCIA.  It will also touch on common use cases for public data sharing and highlight a variety of research activities conducted using TCIA data.  

About:

Justin Kirby received his undergraduate degree in information technology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh.  In 2008 he joined the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research to support NCI's Cancer Imaging Program.  During his tenure at the lab he has focused on image de-identification and projects designed to improve reproducibility and transparency in cancer imaging research.  Most notably, his team founded The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) in 2011.  Through this research resource he has helped support the data sharing requirements of journals, NIH grants, challenge competitions, and major NCI research initiatives including the National Clinical Trials Network, Quantitative Imaging Network, The Cancer Genome Atlas and the Clinical Proteomics Tumor Analysis Consortium.  He serves as a member of the Medical Physics Dataset Article Subcommittee, and has been an invited instructor for imaging informatics courses at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meetings since 2012.