TCIA (The Cancer Imaging Archive)
- Free allowance
- Free. 'We do not charge a fee for sharing your data through TCIA except in rare circumstances where proposals are extremely large.'
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institution?placeholder, not evidence; card unknown, phone unknown
- Binding limit
- write-gatedreview, signed non-negotiable Data Submission Agreement, 'a few months' to complete
- Evidence
- reported3 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | Free. 'We do not charge a fee for sharing your data through TCIA except in rare circumstances where proposals are extremely large.' unit mixed; metered on unstated |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
per-object-cap: one zip per DICOM series (tens of MB each) — the archive is sharded by series, not by dataset. Retention: permanent, DOI per collection. Deposit is NOT self-serve: quarterly Advisory Group review, signed non-negotiable Data Submission Agreement, 'a few months' to complete. |
| Identity | institution (inferred, not read) not published |
| Egress | Free and anonymous. NBIA REST API serves DICOM series zips with no key; CORS open. |
| Per-object cap | not stated |
| Retention | per-object-cap: one zip per DICOM series (tens of MB each) — the archive is sharded by series, not by dataset. Retention: permanent, DOI per collection |
| Interface | rest rest |
| Tooling | NBIA Data Retriever + documented REST API (services.cancerimagingarchive.net/nbia-api/services/v1/), plus the tcia-utils Python package. Deposit side has no API — it is a quarterly-reviewed proposal form. |
| Composes with | Read side is effectively unlimited and needs no account, so the fetch workload scales independently of any deposit relationship. Deposits: one collection per approval, unlimited collections per institution in principle. |
| Reliability | Deposit is a months-long institutional process; read path is fast and stable. Not a drop-box by any reading. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | www.cancerimagingarchive.net/primary-data/ | 'We do not charge a fee', quarterly review, 'a few months', signed agreement required |
| 2026-10-21 | services.cancerimagingarchive.net/nbia-api/services/v1/getCo | probe: GET -> 200, JSON array of collections |
| 2026-10-21 | source not published | probe: GET .../v1/getImage?SeriesInstanceUID=1.3.6.1.4.1.14519.5.2.1.6279.6001.109002525524522225658609808059 -> 200, 49,111,902 bytes, body starts 504b0304 (real ZIP of DICOM) |
Unknown values 3
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- per object cap stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read