# An open data commons linking patient-level radiopharmaceutical dosimetry to outcomes

Source: https://nuclide.cc/ideas/idea-open-dosimetry-data-commons/  
Nuclide record `idea-open-dosimetry-data-commons` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from Nuclide (nuclide.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Every hospital that treats patients with radioactive drugs measures how much radiation reached the tumour and healthy organs, but this data mostly stays locked in each hospital's own files. A shared, public library pooling that dosimetry data, with patient outcomes, would let researchers everywhere build and test better dosing rules, especially smaller centres that don't see enough patients alone.

## Summary

Two open resources already exist but neither covers what is missing. OpenDose is a collaboration of 18 international teams that provides freely downloadable specific absorbed fractions and S-values for 1,252 radionuclides, generated and cross-checked using six different Monte Carlo radiation-transport codes; this is foundational physics reference data (how radiation deposits in standard geometries), not patient-level dosimetry from real treatments. The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), and the NCI Imaging Data Commons that ingests it alongside other sources, hosts large public collections of clinical cancer imaging, including some radiotherapy dose and structure sets, under Creative Commons licences, but there is no dedicated TCIA-style collection pairing diagnostic and post-therapy radiopharmaceutical images with per-patient organ- and tumour-absorbed-dose calculations and clinical outcomes.

The practical consequence is that dose-response findings such as the LUMEN, LUTADOSE and University of Wisconsin dosimetry series described elsewhere in this graph are each built and validated on single-centre cohorts of a few dozen patients, because no shared, pooled, patient-level dataset exists to train or externally validate a dose-response or dose-toxicity model across institutions. This also limits how AI segmentation and dose-prediction models (see the AI dosimetry idea in this graph) can be externally validated, since most reported models are trained and tested within one centre's data.

No dedicated, open, patient-level radiopharmaceutical dosimetry-and-outcomes commons was found in this research; this is an idea rather than a project already under way, distinct from the isotope-supply observatory idea already in this graph, which tracks production and shortage data rather than dosimetry-and-outcome data.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-22
- Tags: open data; dosimetry; data sharing
- Hypothesis: A shared, open repository of patient-level radiopharmaceutical dosimetry data (organ and tumour absorbed doses linked to clinical outcomes, pooled across treating centres) would let smaller nuclear medicine departments and AI developers build and externally validate dose-response and dose-toxicity models that no single centre currently has enough patients to construct or test alone.
- Rationale: OpenDose demonstrates that an international, multi-team collaboration can successfully build and maintain a shared, open dosimetry resource, but its content is Monte Carlo reference physics data rather than patient-level clinical dosimetry. TCIA and the NCI Imaging Data Commons demonstrate that open, licensed sharing of clinical imaging data at scale is technically and legally workable, but no collection there currently pairs radiopharmaceutical dosimetry with clinical outcomes. The gap this idea addresses is the absence of any open resource combining these two proven capabilities for radioligand therapy specifically.
- Proposed test: A pilot data-sharing consortium of 5-10 treating centres pooling de-identified post-therapy SPECT/CT or PET/CT dosimetry data and matched clinical outcomes for patients treated with 177Lu-PSMA-617 or 177Lu-DOTATATE into a common, versioned schema, hosted alongside or modelled on TCIA, with success measured by whether a dose-response or dose-toxicity model trained on the pooled data from most centres externally validates against data from a held-out centre not used in training.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: data

## Sources

- OpenDose: open-access resources for radiopharmaceutical dosimetry: https://www.opendose.org/
- OpenDose: Open-Access Resource for Nuclear Medicine Dosimetry (Journal of Nuclear Medicine, PMC): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7539649/
- Access the Data — The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA): https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/access-data/
- Imaging Data Commons (NCI Cancer Research Data Commons): https://datacommons.cancer.gov/repository/imaging-data-commons

## Connected records

- collections: [The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA)](https://nuclide.cc/collections/tcia/)
- technologies: [Radioligand dosimetry](https://nuclide.cc/technologies/radioligand-dosimetry/)
- ideas: [A global medical isotope supply observatory with forecasts and shortage alerts](https://nuclide.cc/ideas/idea-reg-isotope-supply-observatory/), [AI segmentation to make voxel-level radioligand dosimetry practical at scale](https://nuclide.cc/ideas/idea-ai-lesion-segmentation-dosimetry/)

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