TCIApathfinder: an R client for The Cancer Imaging Archive REST API

Summary: The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) hosts publicly available de-identified medical images of cancer from over 25 body sites and over 30,000 patients. Over 400 published studies have utilized freely available TCIA images. Image series and metadata are available for download through a web interface or a REST API. We present TCIApathfinder, an R client for the TCIA REST API. TCIApathfinder wraps API access in user-friendly R functions that can be called within an R session or easily incorporated into scripts. Functions are provided to explore the contents of the large database and to download image files. Availability and implementation: TCIApathfinder is available under the MIT license as a package on CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/TCIApathfinder/index.html) and at https://github.com/pamelarussell/TCIApathfinder.