The ITK Software Guide: The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (version 1.4)

THE INSIGHT SEGMENTATION AND REGISTRATION TOOLKIT

The creation of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) was sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health. This toolkit provides an extensive suite of software tools for the analysis of data sets available from NLM's Visible Human Project. The methods implemented in the toolkit are applicable to a variety of clinical data such as MRI, CT, ultrasound, PET, fluoroscopy and microscopy. ITK is a fundamental tool facilitating research in medical image processing and analysis, and a rich resource for the development of medical image applications. ITK supports the processes of image registration and segmentation of multi-dimensional data and is implemented using the software methodologies of generic and extreme programming.

The toolkit was initially developed by a group of universities and commercial firms including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Tennessee, GE Global Research, Insightful Corporation, Kitware Inc., The University of Utah, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh University and Columbia University.

OPEN SCIENCE: PROVIDING UNRESTRICTED ACCESS TO THE METHODS, DATA AND RESULTS OF RESEARCH

The Insight Toolkit is an open-source system and extends the principles of open-source software into the domains of science and technology. The fundamental idea that the scientific process should be accessible by the public is extensively practiced in ITK. Thus source code, data and documentation (including the text of this book) are freely available on the web to researchers, commercial firms, teachers and students that make up the medical and image processing communities. This open process is supported by online mailing lists, web pages, and an active community of developers and users.THE FASTEST WAY TO LEARN ITK

Based on the principle of teaching by example, this book guides the reader through an extensive set of image processing, registration and segmentation methods implemented with the Insight Toolkit. Each section presents a series of examples with associated souce code applied to particular image processing and analysis tasks. Fundamental concepts including system architecture, smart pointers and memory management, iterators, and data flow are also described in detail. Complete ITK source code, book examples, documentation, hyperlinked manual pages and data are available on the companion CD-ROM. Additional tools including Kitware's CMake build environment and the VolView image/volume visualization system (supporting ITK-based plug-ins) are provided on the CD as well.

Kitware is a small company dedicated to creating state-of-the-art graphics, visualization, image processing, and software development tools. The open-source solutions developed at Kitware are used around the world by thousands of scientists and programmers in research, academic and commercial settings.

As recognized leaders in visualization technology, Kitware works with several US National Labs to extend VTK for processing large data on massively parallel systems, and develop the open-source scientific visualization application ParaView. Kitware is one of two primary architects of the National Library of Medicine's Insight Toolkit (ITK) for data segmentation and registration, and created the cross-platform build management tool CMake.

Kitware employs world-class experts who have presented papers, taught courses, and served on organizational committees for leading conferences including IEEE Visualization and ACM SIGGRAPH. This guide is part of a series of textbooks published by Kitware covering visualization technologies and software development.