Abstract

In recent years, the use of cloud services became ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Knowingly or not, we rely on the cloud to enable collaborative work, analysis and sharing of data, development and testing of code. In this tutorial the attendees will gain basic understanding of how “the cloud” can support scientific research activities, what are the advantages and challenges of using the cloud, and will have the opportunity to gain practical experience with utilizing the cloud for exploration and analysis of public imaging collections. The tutorial includes both the lecture and hands-on components.
In the hands-on part of the tutorial the attendees will learn about the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Imaging Data Commons, which is a new repository of the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) (https://datacommons.cancer.gov/). NCI CRDC aims to establish a national cloud-based data science infrastructure. Imaging Data Commons (IDC) is a new component of CRDC supported by the Cancer Moonshot™, which aims to enable a broad spectrum of cancer researchers to easily access and explore the value of de-identified imaging data, and to support integrated analyses with non-imaging data. We achieve this goal by co-locating versatile imaging collections with cloud-based compute resources, and visualization and analysis tools. The IDC pilot was released in October 2020, and is being continuously populated with radiology and histopathology collections. IDC provides access to curated imaging collections, accompanied by documentation, a user forum, and a growing number of analysis use cases that aim to demonstrate the value of a data commons framework applied to cancer imaging research. IDC will empower cancer researchers with and without imaging expertise to fully explore the value of imaging data.

Acknowledgements

Development of the NCI Imaging Data Commons has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, under Task Order No. HHSN26110071 under Contract No. HHSN2612015000031. The content of the presented materials does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.