Archives


An archive on Grand Challenge is a collection of archive items, which in turn are medical images optionally supplemented with meta-data.

An archive is thus meant for storing medical images, but archives can also be linked to other services on our platform. You can:

To create an archive go here.

There are three types of users for archives:

  • Editors: An editor is someone who can edit the archive settings, add and remove other editors, uploaders and users. They can also upload cases and edit archive items. An archive can have as many editors as you want.
  • Uploaders: An uploader is a user who can view and upload images to the archive and edit archive items.
  • Users: A user can view the images, but cannot upload or edit them.

Set-up options

  • You need a square logo with a resolution of at least 640x640 px to create your archive.
  • You can make your archive public or private. Public here means that the archive will be visible to all grand-challenge users. Public does not mean, however, that your data is publicly accessible to all users. Users still have to request access to your archive before being able to view and download the data. A private archive is not entirely hidden, meaning that it does not appear on the archive list page and cannot be found by users that do not have the archive's url.
  • If you are unsure about the Viewer, select "Viewer CIRRUS Core (Public)". An overview of available viewers can be found here.
  • Viewer configurations control the behaviour of the web viewer, for example which buttons are visible, which window level to show by default. This can be kept empty to get default options. You can browse and view the available configurations here.
  • Hanging protocol and view content control the layout of the archive items when viewed in the viewer. See here for an description how these two settings can be used
Cases vs. archive items

A case is a medical image that you upload to an archive. Grand Challenge supports the following file formats: .mha, .mhd, .raw, .zraw, .dcm, .nii, .nii.gz, .nrrd, .fda, .fds, .tiff, .png, .jpeg and .jpg. The following file formats can be uploaded and will be converted to tif: Aperio (.svs), Hamamatsu (.vms, .vmu, .ndpi), Leica (.scn), MIRAX (.mrxs) and Ventana (.bif).

Images you upload to Grand Challenge are stored as archive items. These are automatically created for each image you upload. In the simplest case, an archive item consists of just one medical image. Archive items, however, also allow you to store metadata or additional images, like an overlay, along with each image. An archive item could, for example, consist of a medical image and a segmentation map for the image, or a specific disease probability score as metadata or any combination of metadata you can think of.