A Query Tool for Investigator Access to the Data and Images of the National Lung Screening Trial

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), in conjunction with blinded university, provides a mechanism to enable public access to the study data, CT radiology images, and pathology images from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST). Access to the data and images is through the NCI-sponsored, blinded university-hosted The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), a repository of more than 40 study collections of cancer images. Once access to the NLST data has been granted by NCI, a Query Tool within TCIA is used to access the NLST data and images. The Query Tool is a simple-to-use menu-driven database application designed to quickly pose queries and retrieve/save results (from 53,452 NLST participants), download CT images (~20 million available), and view pathology images (~1200 available). NLST study data are contained in 17 Query Tool tables with ~370 variables to query. This paper describes Query Tool design, functionality, and usefulness for researchers, clinicians, and software developers to query data, save query results, and download/view images.