Agent skill · research science · k-dense-ai
imaging-data-commons
Query and download public cancer imaging data from NCI Imaging Data Commons. Invoke for any question about IDC collections, cancer imaging datasets, DICOM data access, radiology (CT, MR, PET) or pathology AI training sets, metadata queries, visualization, or license checks — even when the user doesn't explicitly mention "IDC". No authentication required.
Why this skill is useful
Provides specific commands and workflows for querying and downloading cancer imaging data that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires idc-index installed locally. About 11k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-03. 32,849 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Imaging Data Commons Overview Query and download public cancer imaging data from the National Cancer Institute Imaging Data Commons (IDC). No authentication required for data access. Expected network access: IDC metadata is reachable three ways — a local DuckDB index shipped with the idc-index Python package (no network), or the hosted IDC service over MCP or REST (api.imaging.datacommons.cancer.gov, no authentication). File downloads use public GCS (storage.googleapis.com) and AWS S3 (s3.amazonaws.com) — no authentication required. DICOMweb access uses either the public IDC proxy (proxy.imaging.datacommons.cancer.gov, no auth) or the Google Cloud Healthcare API (healthcare.googleapis.com, requires GCP authentication). Optional BigQuery queries (bigquery.googleapis.com) also require GCP authentication. No credentials or environment variables are accessed by this skill. Current IDC Data Version: v24 (always verify — see Best Practices) Choose the access path first. There is no single default: the cheapest correct path depends on the session and the task. 1. Session already has the IDC MCP server? Route discovery and metadata there — see IDC MCP Server. 2. Otherwise, is idc-index installed? Run python scripts/checkversion.py. If it passes, use idc-index for everything. 3. Not installed, and the task is read-only metadata — counts, attribute values, collection lookups, SQL under 10 000 rows, licenses, citations, viewer URLs? Use the REST API over curl; do not install anything. Installing costs ~77 MB of packaged index data plus pandas, pyarrow, and duckdb, which a metadata question does not need. See Data Access Options. 4. Not installed, and the task needs more than metadata — downloading files, pandas or plotting, pydicom/SimpleITK, pathology tiling, results past 10 000 rows, or a version-pinned script the user re-runs? Install idc-index: checkversion.py exits non-zero and prints the exact install command for the running interpreter. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills k-dense-ai/imaging-data-commons