NCI Imaging Data Commons (IDC)

The Imaging Data Commons (IDC) is a cloud-based repository within the US National Cancer Institute's Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC), launched to support cancer imaging research on the cloud as part of the Cancer Moonshot. It holds over 100 TB of radiology, histopathology and fluorescence slide microscopy images together with image-derived data such as annotations, segmentations and quantitative measurements, plus accompanying clinical data, all harmonised to the DICOM standard.

All data in IDC is publicly available with no registration or access request required, distinguishing it from most other CRDC nodes that gate genomic or clinical data behind data-use agreements. The web portal integrates a customised OHIF viewer supporting visualisation of DICOM segmentation and radiotherapy structure sets, and lets users define patient cohorts from metadata and export them for downstream analysis alongside other CRDC data types (genomic, proteomic).

For radiopharmaceutical research, IDC is a source of curated PET/CT and other molecular imaging collections (including some PSMA and FDG PET datasets contributed by NCI-funded studies or individual investigators) that can be used to develop and validate quantitative imaging biomarkers without needing bespoke data-sharing agreements with individual institutions.